1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
7 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
8 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
9 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
10 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
11 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
12 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
14 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
15 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
16 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
17 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
18 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
19 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
20 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
22 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
25 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
26 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
30 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
31 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
33 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
35 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
37 ** Changes in behavior
39 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
40 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
41 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
43 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
44 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
47 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
51 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
52 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
53 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
54 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
55 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
56 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
57 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
58 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
60 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
61 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
62 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
63 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
64 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
66 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
67 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
69 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
70 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
72 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
73 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
75 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
76 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
78 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
79 additional static suffix to output file names.
81 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
82 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
83 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
85 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
86 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
90 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
91 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
92 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
94 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
95 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
96 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
97 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
98 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
99 typically still point to one of the hard links.
101 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
102 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
103 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
104 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
105 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
107 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
108 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
109 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
110 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
114 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
115 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
116 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
118 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
119 instead of causing a usage failure.
121 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
124 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
128 realpath: print resolved file names.
132 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
133 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
135 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
136 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
138 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
139 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
140 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
141 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
142 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
143 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
145 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
146 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
147 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
149 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
150 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
151 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
153 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
154 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
155 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
156 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
157 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
159 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
161 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
162 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
164 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
165 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
166 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
168 ** Changes in behavior
170 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
171 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
172 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
173 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
174 usually-short referent instead.
176 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
177 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
178 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
179 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
182 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
186 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
187 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
188 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
190 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
191 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
193 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
194 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
198 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
199 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
201 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
202 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
203 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
204 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
206 ** Changes in behavior
208 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
209 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
210 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
214 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
215 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
216 only .tar.xz files is enough.
219 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
223 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
224 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
225 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
227 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
228 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
230 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
231 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
232 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
233 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
234 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
236 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
237 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
238 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
239 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
240 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
241 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
242 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
243 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
245 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
246 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
248 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
249 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
251 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
252 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
254 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
255 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
256 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
258 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
259 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
260 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
261 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
263 ** Changes in behavior
265 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
266 when -v or -c specified.
268 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
269 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
273 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
274 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
275 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
276 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
277 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
279 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
280 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
281 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
283 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
284 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
285 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
286 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
287 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
288 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
289 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
291 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
292 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
293 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
297 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
298 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
300 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
303 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
304 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
306 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
307 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
309 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
310 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
312 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
314 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
318 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
319 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
321 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
324 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
328 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
329 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
331 ** Changes in behavior
333 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
334 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
335 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
336 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
337 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
338 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
340 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
341 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
342 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
346 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
349 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
353 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
354 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
355 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
357 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
358 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
359 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
361 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
362 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
363 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
365 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
366 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
368 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
369 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
371 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
372 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
374 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
375 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
379 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
380 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
381 processed portion thereof.
383 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
384 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
386 ** Changes in behavior
388 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
389 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
390 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
392 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
393 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
394 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
396 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
397 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
399 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
400 Use --preserve-context instead.
402 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
405 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
409 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
410 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
411 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
412 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
413 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
415 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
416 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
418 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
419 reject file names invalid for that file system.
421 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
422 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
426 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
427 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
428 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
429 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
430 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
431 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
432 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
433 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
435 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
436 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
437 the same number of fields are output for each line.
439 ** Changes in behavior
441 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
442 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
443 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
446 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
450 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
451 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
452 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
455 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
459 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
460 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
462 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
463 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
465 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
466 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
468 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
469 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
470 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
471 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
473 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
474 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
476 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
477 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
478 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
480 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
482 ** Changes in behavior
484 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
485 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
486 to the number of available processors.
490 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
493 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
497 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
498 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
499 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
500 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
502 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
503 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
504 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
506 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
507 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
509 ** Changes in behavior
511 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
512 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
514 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
515 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
516 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
517 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
518 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
519 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
521 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
522 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
523 the same way as the others.
526 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
530 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
531 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
532 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
534 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
535 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
537 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
538 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
539 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
541 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
542 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
544 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
545 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
547 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
548 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
549 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
551 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
552 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
553 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
554 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
558 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
559 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
561 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
564 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
565 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
567 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
569 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
570 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
571 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
573 ** Changes in behavior
575 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
576 rather than its aliased target.
578 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
579 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
580 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
582 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
583 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
584 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
585 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
586 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
587 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
588 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
589 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
591 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
593 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
595 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
596 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
599 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
600 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
601 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
602 control like taskset for example.
604 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
606 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
607 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
608 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
609 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
610 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
611 includes %C when context information is available.
613 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
614 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
615 rather than a file system attribute.
617 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
618 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
619 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
620 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
622 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
623 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
624 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
626 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
627 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
628 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
631 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
635 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
636 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
638 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
640 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
641 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
643 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
644 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
645 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
646 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
648 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
649 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
650 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
654 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
655 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
657 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
658 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
659 duration after the initial signal was sent.
661 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
662 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
663 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
664 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
665 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
666 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
667 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
668 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
669 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
671 ** Changes in behavior
673 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
674 sequence when it would be a no-op.
676 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
677 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
680 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
684 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
685 of available processors, which may not have been the case
686 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
687 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
691 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
692 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
694 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
695 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
696 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
697 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
699 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
700 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
701 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
704 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
708 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
709 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
710 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
712 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
713 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
714 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
716 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
717 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
719 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
720 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
721 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
722 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
724 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
725 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
726 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
728 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
729 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
730 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
731 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
733 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
734 renamed-aside and then recreated.
735 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
737 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
738 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
739 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
740 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
742 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
743 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
744 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
746 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
747 processes will not intersperse their output.
748 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
751 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
755 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
756 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
758 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
759 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
761 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
762 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
763 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
764 the presence of the empty string argument.
765 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
767 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
768 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
769 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
770 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
772 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
773 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
775 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
776 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
777 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
779 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
780 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
781 and with a malicious user on the same system
782 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
783 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
786 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
790 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
791 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
792 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
794 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
795 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
796 offending directory and all "contents."
798 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
799 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
800 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
802 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
803 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
804 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
806 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
807 processes will not intersperse their output.
808 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
809 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
811 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
812 output the name of the file to stdout.
813 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
815 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
816 call fails with errno == EACCES.
817 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
819 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
820 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
823 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
824 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
825 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
827 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
828 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
829 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
830 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
831 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
832 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
834 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
835 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
836 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
837 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
839 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
840 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
842 ** Changes in behavior
844 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
845 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
846 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
847 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
848 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
850 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
851 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
852 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
853 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
855 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
857 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
858 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
859 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
860 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
861 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
865 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
869 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
870 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
872 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
873 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
875 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
876 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
877 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
879 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
880 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
883 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
887 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
888 when the source file doesn't have write access.
889 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
891 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
892 to accommodate leap seconds.
893 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
895 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
896 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
897 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
899 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
901 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
902 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
903 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
905 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
906 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
907 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
908 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
909 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
913 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
914 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
915 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
916 directory or a symlink to a directory.
918 ** Changes in behavior
920 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
921 environment variable is set.
923 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
924 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
925 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
929 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
930 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
931 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
932 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
934 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
935 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
936 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
937 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
941 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
942 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
943 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
945 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
946 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
947 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
948 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
949 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
950 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
953 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
954 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
957 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
961 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
962 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
963 and libraries tested at configure time.
964 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
966 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
967 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
969 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
970 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
972 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
973 printing a summary to stderr.
974 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
976 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
977 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
978 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
980 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
981 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
983 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
984 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
985 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
986 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
988 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
989 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
990 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
991 which is relatively unusual.
992 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
994 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
995 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
996 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
997 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
998 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
999 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1000 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1004 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1005 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1006 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1007 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1008 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1012 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1013 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1015 ** Changes in behavior
1017 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1018 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1019 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1020 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1021 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1024 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1028 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1029 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1031 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1032 before data copying has started.
1034 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1035 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1037 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1038 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1039 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1040 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1042 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1043 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1044 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1045 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1047 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1052 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1053 for its standard streams.
1055 ** Changes in behavior
1057 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1058 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1059 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1060 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1061 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1062 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1064 ** Deprecated options
1066 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1067 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1071 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1073 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1074 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1075 a btrfs file system.
1077 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1079 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1080 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1082 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1083 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1086 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1090 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1091 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1092 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1093 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1095 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1096 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1097 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1098 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1099 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1104 make check: two tests have been corrected
1108 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1109 inherited from gnulib.
1112 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1116 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1117 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1118 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1119 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1121 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1122 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1124 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1126 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1127 systems without xattr support.
1129 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1130 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1131 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1133 ** Changes in behavior
1135 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1136 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1137 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1138 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1140 ** Improved robustness
1142 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1143 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1144 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1145 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1146 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1147 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1148 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1149 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1150 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1154 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1155 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1157 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1158 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1159 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1160 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1161 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1164 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1168 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1169 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1170 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1174 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1175 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1176 data was read, or on process exit.
1177 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1179 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1180 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1181 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1182 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1184 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1185 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1186 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1187 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1189 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1190 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1192 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1193 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1195 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1196 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1197 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1199 ** Changes in behavior
1201 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1202 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1203 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1205 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1206 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1208 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1209 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1210 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1213 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1217 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1219 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1220 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1221 install: Never copies xattrs
1223 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1224 from overwriting any existing destination file
1226 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1227 mode where this feature is available.
1229 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1230 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1231 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1232 do not modify the destination at all.
1234 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1236 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1240 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1241 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1243 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1245 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1246 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1248 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1249 processing the first file name
1251 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1252 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1253 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1254 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1256 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1257 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1259 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1260 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1263 ** Changes in behavior
1265 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1266 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1268 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1269 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1270 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1272 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1273 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1275 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1277 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1278 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1279 is still marked with a '+'.
1282 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1286 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1287 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1291 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1292 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1293 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1294 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1295 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1296 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1298 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1299 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1301 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1302 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1304 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1306 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1307 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1308 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1310 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1311 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1313 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1314 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1315 used to factor large numbers.
1317 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1320 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1322 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1324 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1325 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1327 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1328 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1329 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1330 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1332 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1333 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1334 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1336 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1337 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1341 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1343 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1344 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1346 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1347 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1349 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1351 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1352 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1356 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1357 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1358 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1360 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1362 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1363 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1364 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1366 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1367 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1368 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1370 ** Changes in behavior
1372 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1373 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1376 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1380 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1381 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1382 'futimens' system calls.
1386 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1388 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1389 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1390 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1392 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1393 with no USERNAME argument.
1395 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1396 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1397 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1399 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1400 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1401 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1402 number of fields for some inputs.
1404 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1405 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1407 ** Changes in behavior
1409 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1410 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1413 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1417 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1419 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1420 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1421 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1422 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1424 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1425 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1427 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1428 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1430 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1431 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1433 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1434 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1435 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1436 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1438 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1439 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1440 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1441 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1442 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1443 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1445 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1446 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1448 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1449 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1450 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1452 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1453 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1455 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1456 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1458 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1459 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1460 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1461 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1463 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1464 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1466 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1467 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1469 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1470 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1471 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1475 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1476 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1478 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1479 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1480 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1481 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1485 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1486 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1488 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1490 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1494 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1495 which have negative errno values.
1499 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1503 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1507 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1508 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1511 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1515 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1516 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1517 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1519 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1520 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1521 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1522 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1526 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1527 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1528 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1529 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1532 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1536 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1538 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1539 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1540 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1543 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1547 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1548 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1550 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1552 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1554 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1556 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1560 ** Changes in behavior
1562 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1563 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1565 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1566 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1568 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1569 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1570 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1574 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1575 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1576 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1577 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1578 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1579 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1580 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1581 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1582 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1583 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1584 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1586 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1587 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1588 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1591 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1594 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1595 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1596 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1598 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1599 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1600 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1603 ** New build options
1605 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1606 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1607 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1608 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1610 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1611 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1612 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1613 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1614 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1615 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1616 of "make check" fail.
1618 ** Remove deprecated options
1620 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1621 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1622 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1623 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1624 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1626 ** Improved robustness
1628 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1629 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1630 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1631 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1632 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1633 loss of the contents of a/f.
1635 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1636 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1640 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1641 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1642 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1644 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1645 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1646 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1647 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1649 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1650 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1651 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1652 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1653 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1654 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1655 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1656 destination is a symlink.
1658 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1660 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1661 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1663 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1664 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1666 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1668 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1669 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1671 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1672 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1674 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1677 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1678 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1680 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1681 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1683 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1684 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1685 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1686 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1688 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1689 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1690 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1692 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1693 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1694 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1696 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1697 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1698 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1699 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1701 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1702 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1703 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1705 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1706 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1708 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1709 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1711 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1713 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1714 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1715 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1717 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1718 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1720 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1721 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1723 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1724 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1726 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1727 [present in the original version]
1730 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1734 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1736 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1737 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1738 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1740 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1741 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1743 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1747 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1748 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1750 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1751 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1753 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1754 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1756 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1757 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1758 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1759 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1760 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1761 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1763 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1764 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1767 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1768 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1770 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1773 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1774 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1775 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1777 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1778 directory is unreadable.
1780 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1781 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1782 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1784 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1785 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1786 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1787 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1788 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1791 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1792 Before it would print nothing.
1794 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1796 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1797 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1798 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1799 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1800 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1801 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1802 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1803 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1805 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1809 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1810 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1811 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1813 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1814 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1815 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1816 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1819 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1823 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1824 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1825 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1826 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1827 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1828 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1829 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1831 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1832 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1833 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1834 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1835 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1836 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1837 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1838 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1840 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1841 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1842 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1845 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1849 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1850 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1852 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1853 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1854 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1856 ** Improved robustness
1858 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1859 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1860 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1863 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1867 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1868 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1869 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1870 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1871 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1873 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1877 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1880 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1884 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1885 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1886 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1887 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1889 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1890 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1892 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1893 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1894 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1897 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1899 ** Improved robustness
1901 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1902 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1904 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1905 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1906 or NFS-mounted partition.
1908 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1909 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1913 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1914 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1915 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1916 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1917 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1918 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1920 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1921 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1923 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1924 or neglect to report file removal.
1926 For the "groups" command:
1928 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1929 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1931 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1933 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1935 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1939 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1940 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1943 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1945 ** Changes in behavior
1947 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1948 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1949 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1950 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1952 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1953 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1954 a final './' or '../' component.
1956 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1957 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1958 this only for pipes.
1960 ** Infrastructure changes
1962 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1963 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1964 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1965 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1969 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1970 name is "." or "..".
1972 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1973 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1974 dirent.d_type support.
1976 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1977 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1979 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1980 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1981 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1982 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1985 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1987 ** Changes in behavior
1989 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1993 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1994 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1998 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1999 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2000 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2002 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2003 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2005 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2006 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2008 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2010 ** Improved robustness
2012 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2013 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2014 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2016 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2017 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2020 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2021 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2023 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2024 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2026 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2027 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2029 ** Changes in behavior
2031 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2032 where the two are distinct.
2034 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2035 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2036 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2037 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2038 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2039 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2040 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2041 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2042 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2043 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2044 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2045 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2046 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2047 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2048 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2049 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2050 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2052 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2053 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2054 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2056 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2057 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2058 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2059 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2062 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2063 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2067 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2068 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2069 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2070 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2072 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2073 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2074 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2076 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2077 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2078 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2079 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2080 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2083 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2084 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2086 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2087 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2088 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2089 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2091 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2092 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2093 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2095 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2096 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2097 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2098 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2100 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2101 and sticky) with the -m option.
2103 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2104 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2105 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2106 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2107 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2109 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2110 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2112 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2116 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2117 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2118 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2119 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2121 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2123 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2125 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2126 silently ignoring one of them.
2128 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2129 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2130 containing this change was 5.92.
2132 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2133 automatically newline terminated.
2135 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2136 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2137 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2138 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2141 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2142 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2143 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2146 ** Scheduled for removal
2148 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2149 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2151 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2152 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2153 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2154 command to unlink a directory.
2156 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2157 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2158 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2159 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2163 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2164 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2165 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2166 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2167 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2168 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2172 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2173 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2175 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2177 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2178 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2179 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2181 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2182 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2185 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2186 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2188 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2189 list directories before files.
2191 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2192 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2193 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2194 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2197 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2199 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2201 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2202 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2203 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2205 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2206 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2210 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2211 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2212 usually printing nothing.
2214 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2216 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2217 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2218 them with hard-linked directories.
2220 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2221 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2222 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2224 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2225 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2226 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2228 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2231 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2232 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2234 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2235 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2237 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2238 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2240 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2241 all command-line arguments.
2243 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2245 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2247 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2248 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2250 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2252 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2253 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2254 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2255 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2256 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2258 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2259 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2261 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2262 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2263 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2264 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2266 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2268 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2272 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2273 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2275 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2276 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2278 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2279 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2281 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2282 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2284 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2285 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2287 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2289 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2290 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2291 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2294 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2296 ** Build-related bug fixes
2298 installing .mo files would fail
2301 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2305 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2307 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2310 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2314 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2315 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2319 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2321 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2322 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2324 ** Deprecated options
2326 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2327 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2329 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2333 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2335 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2336 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2337 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2338 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2340 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2343 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2349 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2354 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2356 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2358 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2359 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2360 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2362 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2363 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2364 problematic usages. These include:
2366 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2367 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2368 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2369 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2370 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2371 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2372 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2373 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2374 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2376 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2377 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2379 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2380 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2381 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2382 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2384 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2385 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2386 between binary and text files.
2388 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2392 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2396 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2397 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2399 head tac tail tee tr
2400 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2402 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2403 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2405 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2406 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2407 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2409 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2411 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2413 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2414 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2415 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2419 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2421 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2422 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2424 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2425 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2426 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2430 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2431 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2435 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2436 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2437 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2441 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2442 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2446 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2448 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2450 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2454 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2455 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2456 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2458 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2459 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2460 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2461 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2462 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2464 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2468 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2469 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2470 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2472 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2474 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2475 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2476 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2477 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2479 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2481 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2482 rather than silently wrapping around.
2484 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2485 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2487 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2488 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2490 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2491 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2492 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2493 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2495 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2497 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2499 ** Improved robustness
2501 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2502 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2503 no matter how large the result.
2505 ** Improved portability
2507 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2508 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2510 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2512 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2513 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2514 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2516 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2517 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2521 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2522 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2524 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2526 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2527 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2528 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2529 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2531 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2532 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2534 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2535 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2536 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2538 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2540 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2541 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2543 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2544 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2546 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2548 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2549 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2551 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2552 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2554 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2555 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2556 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2558 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2560 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2562 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2566 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2568 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2569 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2570 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2572 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2573 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2575 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2576 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2577 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2579 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2580 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2582 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2583 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2584 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2585 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2587 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2588 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2590 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2591 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2592 the file system does not support it.
2594 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2596 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2597 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2599 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2601 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2602 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2604 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2605 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2606 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2607 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2609 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2610 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2613 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2614 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2615 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2616 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2618 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2619 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2620 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2621 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2623 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2624 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2626 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2628 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2629 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2630 reporting incorrect results.
2634 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2635 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2637 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2640 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2642 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2643 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2645 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2646 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2648 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2651 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2652 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2653 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2654 the file name does not look like a page range.
2656 printf has several changes:
2658 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2659 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2661 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2662 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2663 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2665 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2666 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2669 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2670 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2672 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2673 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2675 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2677 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2678 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2680 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2682 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2684 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2685 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2686 when first encountering the directory.
2690 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2691 output; POSIX requires this.
2693 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2694 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2696 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2698 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2699 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2701 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2702 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2704 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2705 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2706 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2707 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2708 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2709 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2710 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2712 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2713 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2714 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2716 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2717 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2719 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2721 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2723 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2724 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2725 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2726 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2728 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2732 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2733 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2734 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2735 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2736 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2738 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2739 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2740 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2742 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2743 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2745 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2746 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2748 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2749 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2750 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2751 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2752 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2754 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2755 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2757 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2758 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2760 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2762 nocreat do not create the output file
2763 excl fail if the output file already exists
2764 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2765 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2767 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2769 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2770 direct use direct I/O for data
2771 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2772 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2773 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2774 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2775 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2777 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2779 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2780 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2783 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2784 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2785 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2786 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2787 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2788 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2790 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2791 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2793 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2796 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2798 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2800 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2801 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2803 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2804 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2805 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2807 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2808 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2809 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2811 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2813 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2814 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2816 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2817 for compatibility with bash.
2819 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2821 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2822 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2823 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2824 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2826 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2827 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2829 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2830 ls supports TABSIZE.
2831 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2832 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2833 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2835 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2838 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2840 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2841 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2842 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2843 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2844 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2845 an offset, not as a file name.
2847 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2848 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2850 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2851 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2853 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2854 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2856 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2857 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2858 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2860 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2861 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2863 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2864 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2868 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2870 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2872 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2876 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2877 or more arguments between partitions.
2879 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2880 holes in the destination.
2882 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2883 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2884 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2885 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2886 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2887 terminates immediately.
2889 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2891 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2893 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2894 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2895 not the empty string.
2897 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2898 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2902 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2903 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2904 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2907 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2914 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2918 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2919 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2921 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2922 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2924 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2925 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2926 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2929 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2933 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2934 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2936 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2937 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2939 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2940 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2941 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2943 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2945 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2948 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2950 ** Configuration option
2952 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2953 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2957 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2958 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2962 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2963 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2964 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2967 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2968 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2969 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2970 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2971 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2972 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2973 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2976 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2980 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2981 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2982 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2984 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2985 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2987 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2989 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2990 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2991 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2992 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2994 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2996 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2997 not just the ones that reference directories
2999 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3000 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3002 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3003 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3004 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3006 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3007 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3008 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3009 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3010 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3011 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3013 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3018 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3019 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3021 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3023 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3025 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3027 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3028 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3030 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3031 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3033 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3035 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3039 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3041 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3043 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3044 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3045 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3046 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3047 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3049 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3050 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3052 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3053 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3055 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3056 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3058 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3059 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3060 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3064 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3065 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3066 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3067 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3068 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3069 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3070 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3071 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3072 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3073 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3074 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3075 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3076 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3077 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3079 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3081 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3082 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3084 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3086 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3088 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3089 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3091 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3093 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3094 without a trailing newline.
3096 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3097 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3099 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3102 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3106 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3108 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3110 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3111 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3112 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3113 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3115 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3117 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3118 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3119 be printed without leading spaces.
3121 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3122 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3127 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3128 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3129 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3131 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3133 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3134 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3136 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3137 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3139 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3140 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3142 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3144 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3146 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3148 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3149 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3151 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3153 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3155 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3156 byte offsets are specified.
3159 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3162 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3165 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3166 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3167 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3168 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3169 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3170 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3171 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3172 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3173 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3174 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3175 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3176 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3177 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3178 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3179 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3180 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3181 directory where M has write access.
3182 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3183 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3184 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3187 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3188 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3189 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3190 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3191 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3192 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3193 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3194 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3195 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3196 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3197 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3198 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3199 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3200 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3201 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3202 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3203 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3204 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3205 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3206 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3207 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3208 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3209 appeared one additional time.
3211 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3212 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3213 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3214 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3217 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3218 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3219 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3220 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3221 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3222 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3223 if there were more than 338.
3225 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3226 - false --help now exits nonzero
3229 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3230 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3231 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3232 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3235 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3236 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3237 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3238 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3239 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3242 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3243 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3244 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3245 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3246 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3247 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3248 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3251 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3252 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3253 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3254 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3255 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3256 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3258 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3259 under certain unusual conditions
3260 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3261 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3264 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3265 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3266 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3267 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3268 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3269 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3270 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3271 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3272 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3273 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3274 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3275 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3276 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3277 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3278 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3279 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3282 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3283 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3286 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3287 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3288 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3289 involving hard-linked directories
3290 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3291 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3292 character-special and block files
3295 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3296 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3297 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3298 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3299 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3300 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3301 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3302 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3303 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3305 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3306 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3307 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3308 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3309 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3310 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3311 specified on the command line.
3312 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3313 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3314 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3315 the first file untouched.
3316 * readlink: new program
3317 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3318 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3319 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3320 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3321 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3322 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3325 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3326 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3327 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3328 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3329 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3330 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3331 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3332 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3333 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3334 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3335 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3336 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3338 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3339 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3340 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3342 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3343 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3344 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3345 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3346 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3347 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3348 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3349 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3352 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3353 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3356 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3357 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3358 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3359 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3360 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3361 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3362 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3365 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3366 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3368 ========================================================================
3369 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3370 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3373 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3375 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3376 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3377 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3378 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3379 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3380 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3381 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3382 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3383 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3384 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3385 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3386 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3388 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3389 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3390 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3391 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3393 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3396 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3398 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3399 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3400 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3401 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3402 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3403 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3404 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3407 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3408 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3409 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3410 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3411 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3412 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3413 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3414 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3415 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3416 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3417 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3418 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3419 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3420 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3421 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3422 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3424 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3425 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3427 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3428 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3429 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3430 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3431 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3432 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3434 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3435 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3436 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3437 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3438 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3439 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3440 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3442 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3443 the source files in the following example:
3444 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3445 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3446 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3447 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3448 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3449 links between source files with --preserve=links
3450 * cp accepts new options:
3451 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3452 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3453 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3454 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3455 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3456 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3457 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3458 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3459 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3461 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3462 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3463 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3464 even though it's older than dest.
3465 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3466 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3467 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3468 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3469 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3471 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3472 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3473 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3474 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3475 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3476 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3477 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3479 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3480 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3481 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3483 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3484 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3485 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3486 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3487 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3488 This is the default.
3490 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3491 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3492 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3493 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3494 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3496 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3499 ========================================================================
3500 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3501 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3504 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3505 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3507 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3508 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3509 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3510 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3511 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3513 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3514 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3515 that specifies a non-directory
3518 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3519 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3520 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3521 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3522 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3523 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3524 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3525 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3526 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3527 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3528 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3529 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3530 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3531 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3532 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3533 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3534 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3535 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3536 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3537 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3538 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3539 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3540 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3541 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3543 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3544 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3545 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3547 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3549 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3550 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3552 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3553 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3554 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3555 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3556 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3558 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3559 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3560 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3561 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3562 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3564 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3566 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3567 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3568 * still more portability fixes
3569 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3570 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3572 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3574 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3576 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3578 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3579 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3580 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3581 there is any time remaining
3582 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3584 ========================================================================
3585 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3586 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3588 This package began as the union of the following:
3589 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3591 ========================================================================
3593 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3595 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3596 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3597 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3598 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3599 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3600 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.