1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
8 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
10 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
11 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
13 ** Changes in behavior
15 chmod -v and -c now output the original mode in the messages.
19 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
20 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
21 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
22 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
23 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
24 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
25 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
29 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
30 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
33 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
37 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
38 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
40 ** Changes in behavior
42 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
43 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
44 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
45 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
46 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
47 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
49 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
50 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
51 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
55 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
58 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
62 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
63 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
66 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
67 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
68 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
70 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
71 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
72 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
74 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
75 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
77 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
78 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
80 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
81 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
83 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
84 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
88 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
89 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
90 processed portion thereof.
92 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
93 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
95 ** Changes in behavior
97 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
98 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
99 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
101 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
102 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
103 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
105 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
106 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
108 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
109 Use --preserve-context instead.
111 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
114 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
118 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
119 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
120 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
121 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
122 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
124 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
125 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
127 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
128 reject file names invalid for that file system.
130 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
131 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
135 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
136 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
137 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
138 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
139 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
140 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
141 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
142 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
144 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
145 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
146 the same number of fields are output for each line.
148 ** Changes in behavior
150 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
151 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
152 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
155 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
159 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
160 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
161 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
164 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
168 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
169 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
171 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
172 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
174 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
175 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
177 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
178 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
179 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
180 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
182 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
183 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
185 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
186 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
187 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
189 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
191 ** Changes in behavior
193 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
194 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
195 to the number of available processors.
199 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
202 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
206 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
207 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
208 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
209 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
211 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
212 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
213 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
215 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
216 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
218 ** Changes in behavior
220 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
221 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
223 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
224 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
225 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
226 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
227 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
228 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
230 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
231 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
232 the same way as the others.
235 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
239 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
240 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
241 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
243 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
244 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
246 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
247 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
248 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
250 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
251 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
253 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
254 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
256 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
257 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
258 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
260 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
261 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
262 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
263 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
267 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
268 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
270 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
273 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
274 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
276 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
278 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
279 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
280 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
282 ** Changes in behavior
284 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
285 rather than its aliased target.
287 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
288 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
289 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
291 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
292 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
293 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
294 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
295 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
296 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
297 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
298 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
300 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
302 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
304 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
305 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
308 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
309 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
310 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
311 control like taskset for example.
313 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
315 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
316 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
317 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
318 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
319 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
320 includes %C when context information is available.
322 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
323 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
324 rather than a file system attribute.
326 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
327 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
328 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
329 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
331 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
332 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
333 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
335 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
336 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
337 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
340 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
344 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
345 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
347 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
349 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
350 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
352 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
353 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
354 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
355 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
357 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
358 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
359 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
363 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
364 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
366 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
367 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
368 duration after the initial signal was sent.
370 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
371 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
372 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
373 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
374 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
375 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
376 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
377 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
378 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
380 ** Changes in behavior
382 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
383 sequence when it would be a no-op.
385 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
386 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
389 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
393 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
394 of available processors, which may not have been the case
395 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
396 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
400 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
401 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
403 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
404 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
405 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
406 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
408 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
409 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
410 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
413 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
417 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
418 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
419 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
421 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
422 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
423 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
425 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
426 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
428 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
429 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
430 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
431 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
433 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
434 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
435 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
437 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
438 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
439 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
440 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
442 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
443 renamed-aside and then recreated.
444 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
446 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
447 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
448 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
449 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
451 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
452 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
455 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
456 processes will not intersperse their output.
457 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
460 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
464 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
465 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
467 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
468 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
470 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
471 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
472 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
473 the presence of the empty string argument.
474 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
476 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
477 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
478 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
479 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
481 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
482 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
484 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
485 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
486 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
488 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
489 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
490 and with a malicious user on the same system
491 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
492 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
495 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
499 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
500 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
501 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
503 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
504 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
505 offending directory and all "contents."
507 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
508 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
509 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
511 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
512 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
513 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
515 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
516 processes will not intersperse their output.
517 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
518 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
520 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
521 output the name of the file to stdout.
522 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
524 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
525 call fails with errno == EACCES.
526 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
528 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
529 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
532 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
533 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
534 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
536 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
537 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
538 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
539 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
540 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
541 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
543 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
544 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
545 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
546 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
548 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
549 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
551 ** Changes in behavior
553 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
554 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
555 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
556 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
557 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
559 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
560 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
561 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
562 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
564 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
566 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
567 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
568 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
569 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
570 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
574 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
578 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
579 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
581 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
582 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
584 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
585 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
586 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
588 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
589 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
592 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
596 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
597 when the source file doesn't have write access.
598 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
600 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
601 to accommodate leap seconds.
602 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
604 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
605 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
606 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
608 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
610 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
611 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
612 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
614 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
615 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
616 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
617 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
618 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
622 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
623 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
624 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
625 directory or a symlink to a directory.
627 ** Changes in behavior
629 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
630 environment variable is set.
632 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
633 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
634 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
638 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
639 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
640 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
641 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
643 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
644 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
645 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
646 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
650 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
651 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
652 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
654 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
655 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
656 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
657 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
658 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
659 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
662 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
663 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
666 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
670 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
671 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
672 and libraries tested at configure time.
673 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
675 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
676 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
678 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
679 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
681 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
682 printing a summary to stderr.
683 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
685 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
686 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
687 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
689 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
690 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
692 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
693 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
694 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
695 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
697 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
698 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
699 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
700 which is relatively unusual.
701 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
703 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
704 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
705 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
706 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
707 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
708 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
709 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
713 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
714 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
715 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
716 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
717 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
721 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
722 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
724 ** Changes in behavior
726 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
727 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
728 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
729 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
730 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
733 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
737 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
738 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
740 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
741 before data copying has started.
743 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
744 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
746 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
747 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
748 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
749 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
751 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
752 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
753 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
754 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
756 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
761 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
762 for its standard streams.
764 ** Changes in behavior
766 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
767 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
768 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
769 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
770 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
771 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
773 ** Deprecated options
775 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
776 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
780 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
782 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
783 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
786 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
788 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
789 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
791 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
792 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
795 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
799 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
800 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
801 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
802 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
804 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
805 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
806 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
807 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
808 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
813 make check: two tests have been corrected
817 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
818 inherited from gnulib.
821 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
825 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
826 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
827 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
828 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
830 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
831 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
833 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
835 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
836 systems without xattr support.
838 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
839 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
840 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
842 ** Changes in behavior
844 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
845 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
846 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
847 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
849 ** Improved robustness
851 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
852 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
853 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
854 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
855 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
856 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
857 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
858 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
859 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
863 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
864 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
866 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
867 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
868 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
869 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
870 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
873 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
877 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
878 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
879 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
883 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
884 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
885 data was read, or on process exit.
886 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
888 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
889 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
890 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
891 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
893 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
894 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
895 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
896 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
898 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
899 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
901 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
902 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
904 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
905 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
906 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
908 ** Changes in behavior
910 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
911 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
912 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
914 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
915 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
917 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
918 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
919 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
922 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
926 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
928 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
929 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
930 install: Never copies xattrs
932 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
933 from overwriting any existing destination file
935 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
936 mode where this feature is available.
938 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
939 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
940 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
941 do not modify the destination at all.
943 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
945 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
949 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
950 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
952 cp uses much less memory in some situations
954 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
955 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
957 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
958 processing the first file name
960 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
961 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
962 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
963 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
965 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
966 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
968 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
969 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
972 ** Changes in behavior
974 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
975 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
977 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
978 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
979 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
981 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
982 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
984 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
986 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
987 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
988 is still marked with a '+'.
991 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
995 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
996 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1000 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1001 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1002 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1003 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1004 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1005 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1007 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1008 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1010 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1011 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1013 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1015 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1016 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1017 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1019 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1020 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1022 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1023 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1024 used to factor large numbers.
1026 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1029 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1031 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1033 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1034 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1036 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1037 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1038 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1039 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1041 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1042 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1043 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1045 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1046 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1050 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1052 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1053 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1055 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1056 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1058 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1060 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1061 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1065 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1066 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1067 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1069 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1071 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1072 no matter how many files are in a given directory
1074 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1075 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1076 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1078 ** Changes in behavior
1080 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1081 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1084 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1088 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1090 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1091 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1092 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1094 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1095 with no USERNAME argument.
1097 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1098 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1099 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1101 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1102 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1103 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1104 number of fields for some inputs.
1106 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1107 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1109 ** Changes in behavior
1111 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1112 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1115 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1119 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1121 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1122 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1123 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1124 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1126 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1127 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1129 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1130 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1132 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1133 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1135 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1136 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1137 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1138 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1140 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1141 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1142 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1143 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1144 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1145 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1147 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1148 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1150 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1151 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1152 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1154 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1155 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1157 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1158 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1160 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1161 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1162 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1163 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1165 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1166 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1168 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1169 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1171 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1172 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1173 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1177 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1178 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1180 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1181 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1182 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1183 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1187 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1188 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1190 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1192 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1196 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1197 which have negative errno values.
1201 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1205 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1209 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1210 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1213 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1217 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1218 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1219 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1221 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1222 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1223 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1224 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1228 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1229 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1230 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1231 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1234 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1238 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1240 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1241 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1242 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1245 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1249 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1250 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1252 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1254 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1256 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1258 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1262 ** Changes in behavior
1264 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1265 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1267 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1268 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1270 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1271 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1272 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1276 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1277 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1278 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1279 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1280 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1281 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1282 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1283 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1284 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1285 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1286 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1288 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1289 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1290 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1293 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1296 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1297 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1298 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1300 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1301 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1302 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1305 ** New build options
1307 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1308 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1309 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1310 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1312 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1313 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1314 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1315 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1316 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1317 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1318 of "make check" fail.
1320 ** Remove deprecated options
1322 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1323 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1324 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1325 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1326 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1328 ** Improved robustness
1330 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1331 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1332 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1333 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1334 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1335 loss of the contents of a/f.
1337 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1338 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1342 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1343 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1344 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1346 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1347 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1348 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1349 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1351 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1352 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1353 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1354 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1355 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1356 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1357 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1358 destination is a symlink.
1360 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1362 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1363 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1365 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1366 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1368 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1370 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1371 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1373 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1374 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1376 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1379 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1380 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1382 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1383 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1385 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1386 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1387 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1388 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1390 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1391 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1392 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1394 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1395 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1396 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1398 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1399 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1400 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1401 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1403 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1404 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1405 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1407 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1408 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1410 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1411 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1413 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1415 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1416 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1417 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1419 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1420 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1422 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1423 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1425 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1426 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1428 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1429 [present in the original version]
1432 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1436 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1438 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1439 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1440 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1442 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1443 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1445 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1449 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1450 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1452 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1453 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1455 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1456 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1458 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1459 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1460 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1461 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1462 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1463 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1465 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1466 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1469 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1470 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1472 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1475 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1476 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1477 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1479 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1480 directory is unreadable.
1482 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1483 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1484 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1486 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1487 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1488 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1489 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1490 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1493 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1494 Before it would print nothing.
1496 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1498 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1499 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1500 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1501 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1502 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1503 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1504 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1505 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1507 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1511 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1512 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1513 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1515 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1516 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1517 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1518 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1521 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1525 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1526 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1527 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1528 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1529 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1530 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1531 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1533 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1534 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1535 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1536 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1537 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1538 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1539 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1540 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1542 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1543 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1544 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1547 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1551 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1552 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1554 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1555 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1556 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1558 ** Improved robustness
1560 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1561 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1562 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1565 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1569 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1570 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1571 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1572 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1573 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1575 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1579 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1582 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1586 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1587 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1588 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1589 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1591 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1592 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1594 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1595 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1596 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1599 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1601 ** Improved robustness
1603 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1604 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1606 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1607 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1608 or NFS-mounted partition.
1610 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1611 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1615 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1616 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1617 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1618 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1619 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1620 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1622 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1623 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1625 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1626 or neglect to report file removal.
1628 For the "groups" command:
1630 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1631 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1633 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1635 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1637 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1641 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1642 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1645 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1647 ** Changes in behavior
1649 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1650 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1651 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1652 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1654 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1655 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1656 a final `./' or `../' component.
1658 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1659 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1660 this only for pipes.
1662 ** Infrastructure changes
1664 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1665 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1666 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1667 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1671 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1672 name is "." or "..".
1674 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1675 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1676 dirent.d_type support.
1678 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1679 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1681 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1682 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1683 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1684 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1687 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1689 ** Changes in behavior
1691 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1695 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1696 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1700 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1701 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1702 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1704 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1705 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1707 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1708 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1710 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1712 ** Improved robustness
1714 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1715 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1716 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1718 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1719 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1722 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1723 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1725 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1726 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1728 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1729 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1731 ** Changes in behavior
1733 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1734 where the two are distinct.
1736 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1737 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1738 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1739 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1740 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1741 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1742 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1743 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1744 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1745 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1746 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1747 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1748 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1749 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1750 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1751 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1752 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1754 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1755 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1756 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1758 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1759 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1760 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1761 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1764 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1765 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1769 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1770 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1771 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1772 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1774 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1775 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1776 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1778 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1779 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1780 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1781 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1782 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1785 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1786 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1788 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1789 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1790 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1791 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1793 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1794 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1795 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1797 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1798 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1799 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1800 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1802 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1803 and sticky) with the -m option.
1805 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1806 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1807 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1808 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1809 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1811 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1812 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1814 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1818 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1819 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1820 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1821 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1823 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1825 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1827 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1828 silently ignoring one of them.
1830 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1831 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1832 containing this change was 5.92.
1834 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1835 automatically newline terminated.
1837 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1838 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1839 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1840 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1843 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1844 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1845 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1848 ** Scheduled for removal
1850 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1851 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1853 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1854 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1855 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1856 command to unlink a directory.
1858 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1859 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1860 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1861 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1865 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1866 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1867 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1868 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1869 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1870 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1874 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1875 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1877 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1879 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1880 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1881 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1883 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1884 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1887 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1888 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1890 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1891 list directories before files.
1893 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1894 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1895 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1896 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1899 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1901 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1903 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1904 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1905 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1907 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1908 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1912 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1913 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1914 usually printing nothing.
1916 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1918 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1919 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1920 them with hard-linked directories.
1922 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1923 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1924 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1926 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1927 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1928 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1930 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1933 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1934 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1936 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1937 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1939 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1940 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1942 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1943 all command-line arguments.
1945 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1947 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1949 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1950 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1952 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1954 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1955 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1956 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1957 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1958 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1960 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1961 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1963 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1964 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1965 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1966 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1968 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1970 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1974 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1975 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1977 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1978 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1980 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1981 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1983 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1984 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1986 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1987 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1989 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1991 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1992 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1993 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1996 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1998 ** Build-related bug fixes
2000 installing .mo files would fail
2003 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2007 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2009 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2012 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2016 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2017 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2021 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2023 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2024 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2026 ** Deprecated options
2028 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2029 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2031 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2035 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2037 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2038 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2039 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2040 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2042 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2045 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2051 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2056 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2058 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2060 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2061 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2062 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2064 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2065 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2066 problematic usages. These include:
2068 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2069 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2070 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2071 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2072 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2073 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2074 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2075 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2076 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2078 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2079 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2081 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2082 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2083 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2084 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2086 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2087 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2088 between binary and text files.
2090 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2094 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2098 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2099 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2101 head tac tail tee tr
2102 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2104 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2105 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2107 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2108 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2109 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2111 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2113 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2115 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2116 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2117 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2121 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2123 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2124 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2126 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2127 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2128 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2132 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2133 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2137 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2138 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2139 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2143 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2144 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2148 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2150 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2152 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2156 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2157 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2158 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2160 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2161 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2162 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2163 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2164 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2166 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2170 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2171 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2172 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2174 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2176 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2177 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2178 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2179 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2181 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2183 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2184 rather than silently wrapping around.
2186 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2187 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2189 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2190 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2192 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2193 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2194 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2195 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2197 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2199 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2201 ** Improved robustness
2203 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2204 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2205 no matter how large the result.
2207 ** Improved portability
2209 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2210 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2212 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2214 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2215 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2216 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2218 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2219 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2223 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2224 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2226 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2228 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2229 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2230 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2231 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2233 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2234 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2236 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2237 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2238 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2240 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2242 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2243 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2245 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2246 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2248 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2250 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2251 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2253 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2254 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2256 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2257 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2258 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2260 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2262 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2264 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2268 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2270 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2271 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2272 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2274 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2275 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2277 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2278 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2279 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2281 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2282 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2284 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2285 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2286 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2287 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2289 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2290 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2292 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2293 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2294 the file system does not support it.
2296 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2298 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2299 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2301 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2303 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2304 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2306 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2307 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2308 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2309 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2311 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2312 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2315 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2316 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2317 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2318 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2320 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2321 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2322 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2323 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2325 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2326 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2328 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2330 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2331 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2332 reporting incorrect results.
2336 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2337 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2339 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2342 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2344 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2345 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2347 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2348 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2350 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2353 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2354 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2355 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2356 the file name does not look like a page range.
2358 printf has several changes:
2360 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2361 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2363 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2364 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2365 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2367 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2368 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2371 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2372 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2374 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2375 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2377 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2379 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2380 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2382 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2384 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2386 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2387 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2388 when first encountering the directory.
2392 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2393 output; POSIX requires this.
2395 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2396 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2398 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2400 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2401 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2403 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2404 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2406 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2407 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2408 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2409 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2410 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2411 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2412 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2414 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2415 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2416 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2418 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2419 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2421 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2423 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2425 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2426 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2427 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2428 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2430 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2434 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2435 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2436 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2437 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2438 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2440 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2441 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2442 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2444 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2445 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2447 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2448 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2450 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2451 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2452 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2453 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2454 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2456 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2457 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2459 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2460 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2462 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2464 nocreat do not create the output file
2465 excl fail if the output file already exists
2466 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2467 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2469 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2471 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2472 direct use direct I/O for data
2473 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2474 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2475 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2476 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2477 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2479 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2481 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2482 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2485 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2486 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2487 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2488 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2489 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2490 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2492 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2493 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2495 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2498 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2500 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2502 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2503 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2505 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2506 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2507 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2509 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2510 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2511 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2513 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2515 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2516 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2518 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2519 for compatibility with bash.
2521 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2523 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2524 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2525 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2526 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2528 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2529 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2531 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2532 ls supports TABSIZE.
2533 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2534 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2535 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2537 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2540 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2542 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2543 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2544 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2545 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2546 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2547 an offset, not as a file name.
2549 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2550 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2552 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2553 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2555 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2556 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2558 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2559 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2560 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2562 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2563 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2565 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2566 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2570 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2572 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2574 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2578 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2579 or more arguments between partitions.
2581 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2582 holes in the destination.
2584 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2585 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2586 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2587 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2588 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2589 terminates immediately.
2591 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2593 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2595 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2596 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2597 not the empty string.
2599 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2600 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2604 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2605 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2606 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2609 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2616 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2620 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2621 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2623 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2624 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2626 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2627 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2628 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2631 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2635 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2636 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2638 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2639 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2641 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2642 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2643 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2645 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2647 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2650 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2652 ** Configuration option
2654 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2655 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2659 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2660 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2664 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2665 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2666 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2669 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2670 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2671 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2672 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2673 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2674 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2675 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2678 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2682 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2683 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2684 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2686 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2687 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2689 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2691 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2692 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2693 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2694 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2696 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2698 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2699 not just the ones that reference directories
2701 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2702 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2704 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2705 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2706 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2708 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2709 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2710 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2711 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2712 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2713 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2715 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2720 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2721 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2723 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2725 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2727 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2729 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2730 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2732 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2733 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2735 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2737 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2741 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2743 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2745 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2746 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2747 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2748 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2749 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2751 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2752 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2754 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2755 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2757 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2758 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2760 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2761 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2762 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2766 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2767 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2768 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2769 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2770 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2771 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2772 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2773 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2774 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2775 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2776 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2777 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2778 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2779 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2781 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2783 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2784 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2786 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2788 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2790 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2791 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2793 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2795 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2796 without a trailing newline.
2798 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2799 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2801 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2804 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2808 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2810 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2812 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2813 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2814 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2815 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2817 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2819 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2820 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2821 be printed without leading spaces.
2823 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2824 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2829 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2830 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2831 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2833 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2835 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2836 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2838 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2839 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2841 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2842 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2844 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2846 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2848 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2850 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2851 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2853 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2855 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2857 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2858 byte offsets are specified.
2861 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2864 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2867 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2868 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2869 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2870 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2871 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2872 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2873 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2874 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2875 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2876 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2877 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2878 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2879 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2880 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2881 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2882 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2883 directory where M has write access.
2884 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2885 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2886 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2889 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2890 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2891 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2892 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2893 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2894 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2895 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2896 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2897 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2898 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2899 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2900 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2901 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2902 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2903 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2904 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2905 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2906 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2907 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2908 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2909 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2910 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2911 appeared one additional time.
2913 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2914 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2915 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2916 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2919 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2920 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2921 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2922 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2923 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2924 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2925 if there were more than 338.
2927 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2928 - false --help now exits nonzero
2931 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2932 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2933 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2934 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2937 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2938 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2939 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2940 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2941 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2944 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2945 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2946 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2947 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2948 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2949 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2950 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2953 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2954 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2955 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2956 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2957 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2958 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2960 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2961 under certain unusual conditions
2962 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2963 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2966 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2967 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2968 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2969 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2970 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2971 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2972 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2973 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2974 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2975 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2976 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2977 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2978 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2979 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2980 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2981 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2984 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2985 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2988 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2989 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2990 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2991 involving hard-linked directories
2992 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2993 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2994 character-special and block files
2997 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2998 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2999 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3000 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3001 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3002 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3003 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3004 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3005 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3007 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3008 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3009 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3010 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3011 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3012 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3013 specified on the command line.
3014 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3015 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3016 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3017 the first file untouched.
3018 * readlink: new program
3019 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3020 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3021 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3022 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3023 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3024 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3027 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3028 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3029 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3030 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3031 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3032 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3033 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3034 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3035 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3036 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3037 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3038 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3040 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3041 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3042 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3044 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3045 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3046 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3047 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3048 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3049 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3050 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3051 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3054 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3055 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3058 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3059 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3060 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3061 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3062 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3063 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3064 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3067 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3068 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3070 ========================================================================
3071 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3072 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3075 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3077 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3078 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3079 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3080 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3081 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3082 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3083 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3084 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3085 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3086 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3087 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3088 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3090 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3091 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3092 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3093 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3095 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3098 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3100 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3101 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3102 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3103 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3104 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3105 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3106 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3109 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3110 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3111 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3112 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3113 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3114 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3115 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3116 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3117 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3118 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3119 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3120 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3121 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3122 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3123 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3124 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3126 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3127 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3129 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3130 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3131 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3132 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3133 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3134 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3136 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3137 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3138 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3139 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3140 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3141 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3142 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3144 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3145 the source files in the following example:
3146 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3147 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3148 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3149 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3150 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3151 links between source files with --preserve=links
3152 * cp accepts new options:
3153 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3154 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3155 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3156 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3157 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3158 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3159 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3160 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3161 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3163 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3164 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3165 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3166 even though it's older than dest.
3167 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3168 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3169 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3170 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3171 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3173 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3174 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3175 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3176 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3177 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3178 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3179 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3181 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3182 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3183 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3185 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3186 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3187 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3188 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3189 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3190 This is the default.
3192 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3193 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3194 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3195 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3196 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3198 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3201 ========================================================================
3202 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3203 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3206 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3207 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3209 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3210 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3211 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3212 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3213 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3215 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3216 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3217 that specifies a non-directory
3220 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3221 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3222 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3223 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3224 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3225 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3226 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3227 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3228 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3229 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3230 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3231 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3232 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3233 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3234 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3235 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3236 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3237 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3238 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3239 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3240 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3241 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3242 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3243 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3245 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3246 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3247 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3249 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3251 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3252 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3254 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3255 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3256 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3257 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3258 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3260 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3261 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3262 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3263 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3264 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3266 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3268 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3269 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3270 * still more portability fixes
3271 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3272 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3274 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3276 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3278 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3280 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3281 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3282 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3283 there is any time remaining
3284 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3286 ========================================================================
3287 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3288 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3290 This package began as the union of the following:
3291 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3293 ========================================================================
3295 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3297 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3298 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3299 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3300 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3301 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3302 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.