1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
3 * Major changes in release 4.5.14, 2014-07-19
7 #42793: "Failed to write output" with -ls (this bug affected only
10 * Major changes in release 4.5.13, 2014-07-16
12 ** Documentation Changes
14 Some minor documentation improvements are listed in "Bug Fixes" below.
18 #40339: Fix leaked directory handle when listing mounted file
21 #40094: The xargs --help output has a small number of cosmetic
24 #39197: Small fix to find's manual page to remove an unwanted
25 backslash, which made the troff incompatible with Eric
26 Raymond's doclifter software.
28 #39162: -printf reads beyond arguments terminated by \
30 #35753: Check the success/failure of material I/O operations where
31 these are important to the use of the output (i.e. check the
32 output for "find -ok" but not debugging output).
34 #31005: The find manual page and Texinfo manual now more clearly state
35 that -exec ... + always returns true.
40 Updated translations: Estonian, Polish, Ukranian.
43 * Major changes in release 4.5.12, 2013-09-22
45 ** Functional Changes to find
47 The GNU extension "find ... -perm /MODE" is no longer disabled when
48 the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
50 The obsolete GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE", which was withdrawn
51 in release 4.2.21 in 2005 due to compatibility problems, has been
52 completely removed. Use "find ... -perm /MODE" instead.
54 ** Documentation Changes
56 If you use -type or -xtype with a type letter corresponding to a file
57 type which is not supported by the system on which find was compiled,
58 find will now give a clearer error message (though the functionality
59 is unchanged). Type letters are affected are D, l and p (for Solaris
60 Doors, symbolic links and named pipes respectively).
62 The output of xargs --help has been slightly changed for greater
65 The documentation for xargs now warns about parallel processes (xargs
68 The documentation for find -execdir now describes correctly that the
69 command will be executed in the same directory as the file we were
70 considering at the time. The documentation previously (and
71 incorrectly) stated that the original working directory of find would
76 Some bugs in 4.5.11 were fixed without adding them to the bug
77 database, though they are in the ChangeLog:
79 *** Use of [[ ... ]] in find/testsuite/sv-bug-32043.sh
81 *** Don't delete header files in "lib/" for "make clean".
83 *** xargs: wait for process before prompting in interactive mode (-p)
85 These following fixed bugs are recorded at
86 https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils:
88 #40088: potential buffer overflow in -execdir and -okdir
90 #39324: exits without error on OOM
92 #38583: errno-buffer read failed in xargs_do_exec
94 #38474: Unintended (?) behaviour change of -perm +mode predicate
96 #36652: Better document that -0/-d turns off the effect of -E.
98 #34976: find -execdir leaks file descriptors for the working directory
101 * Major changes in release 4.5.11, 2013-02-02
103 ** Documentation Changes
105 The Texinfo manual and the find manual pafe now explain why two find
106 binaries (either 'find' and 'oldfind', or 'find' and 'ftsfind') are
107 installed. A manual page for either ftsfind or oldfind is also
108 installed, whichever is appropriate.
112 #34079: Apply gnulib ftw memory fix
114 #33384: If rm/chmod etc. are not in /bin or /usr/bin, updatedb fails
116 #18227: find -ls does not display device major/minor numbers.
118 #29698: Correct and clarify documentation of xargs -d option
120 #32887: Present xargs options alphabetically like in GNU cp(1) etc
122 #14386: updatedb relies on mktemp, which is not portable.
124 #32043: find -name [ doesn't obey posix
126 #37926: The -inum predicate previously gave wrong results in oldfind
127 (ftsfind, the default find binary, was unaffected).
129 ** Functional Changes to xargs
131 If no utility is specified, xargs now calls "echo" (and searches on
132 $PATH to find it) rather than "/bin/echo". This may give rise to
133 subtle behaviour differences for some users. To avoid unexpected
134 surprises, just explicitly specify the utility you would like to run.
135 For example use "xargs /bin/echo < foo" rather than "xargs < foo".
137 A new option is provided, --process-slot-var. If you set this, xargs
138 will set the indicated environment variable in each child. The values
139 are re-used, but no executing child process will have the same value
140 as another executing child process. This wishlist item was Savannah
143 ** Functional Changes to find
145 For find -printf, the format specifiers %{, %[ and %( are all now
146 reserved for future use. Previously these would print {, [ and (
147 respectively, but in any case those characters can just be printed
148 literally like this: find -printf "{[(". Code changes intended to
149 explain that these are reserved went into findutils-4.5.5, but this
150 code had, before now, had no effect.
152 When expanding "-printf '%F'", find reads /etc/mtab. We now take the
153 last match found in this file, rather than the first, to better deal
154 with implementations which have duplicate entries (for example
155 /proc/mounts on systems running the Linux kernel).
157 Both oldfind and ftsfind now use less heap memory when processing
158 directories containing very many files. However, oldfind now uses one
159 file descriptor per recursive subdirectory level, which will further
160 limit the depth of directory trees it can search. If you need find to
161 be able to search deep directory trees, use ftsfind (this is, by
162 default the binary built and installed as 'find').
164 The behaviour of the "awk", "posix-awk" and "gnu-awk" regular
165 expression types selected by the -regextype option have slightly
166 changed, to bring them into line with the behaviour of the GNU C
167 library. For "awk", character classes (such as [[:digit:]]) are now
168 supported. For "gnu-awk" and "posix-awk", intervals are supported and
169 invalid interval specifcations are treated as literals (for example
170 'a{1' is treated as 'a\{1').
173 * Major changes in release 4.5.10, 2011-05-11
175 ** Documentation Changes
177 The manual now includes a small number of references to further
182 #30608: Automagic dependency on selinux. The configure script now
183 provides a --without-selinux option.
185 #29949: find -execdir does not change working directory
187 #31359: test-strstr unit test fails on alpha.
189 #30777: find -exec echo TURNIP{} \+ is accepted but TURNIP is eaten
191 #30180: error message from incorrect -size option is off
193 #29828: test suite deadlock on FreeBSD.
197 Updated translations: Finnish, Italian, Danish, Slovenian, German,
198 Estonian, French, Japanese, Danish.
200 * Major changes in release 4.5.9, 2010-04-29
204 #29593: Make import-gnulib.sh work under a POSIX shell.
206 #29511: fails to build on kfreebsd-*
208 #27563: -L breaks -execdir
210 #19593: -execdir .... {} + has suboptimal performance (see below)
214 Updated translations: Chinese (simplified).
216 ** Performance changes
218 The find program will once again build argument lists longer than 1
219 with "-execdir ...+". The upper limit of 1 argument for execdir was
220 introduced as a workaround in findutils-4.3.4. The limit is now
221 removed, but find still does not issue the maximum possible number of
222 arguments, since an exec will occur each time find encounters a
223 subdirectory (if at least one argument is pending).
225 ** Functional enhancements to xargs
227 You can now increase the parallelism of xargs in mid-run by sending
228 it SIGUSR1, and decrease the parallelism with SIGUSR2.
230 * Major changes in release 4.5.8, 2010-04-07
234 #29460: -printf %Y fails in $CWD-dependent way
236 #27974: Use gnulib's xreadlinkat support
238 #29435: fd_is_cloexec does not work on Fedora buildhosts
240 #27221: symlink_loop check broken by FTS_CWDFD
242 #27213: avoid failed assertions for non-executable directories.
246 Updated Vietnamese, Czech, Dutch, Polish, Russian translations.
248 * Major changes in release 4.5.7, 2010-04-03
250 ** Performance changes
252 If you use the -fstype FOO predicate and specify a filsystem type FOO
253 which is not known (e.g. present in /etc/mtab) at the time find
254 starts, that predicate is now equivalent to -false. This substitution
255 currently occurs at optimisation level 2 and above.
259 Copyright headers in the translation files have been updated. Some
260 additional messages have been marked for translation. However, there
261 have not been any changes to translation text. The main purpose of
262 this release is to provide a base for updated translations.
264 * Major changes in release 4.5.6b, 2010-03-30
266 This is a replacement release for 4.5.6, which is not available by FTP
267 since it contains Makefiles which are vulnerable to CVE-2009-4029.
269 * Major changes in release 4.5.6, 2010-03-30
271 ** Functional Enhancements to find
273 patch #4848: Patch - Support for SELinux
277 #29089: SELinux --context and %Z options
279 #28872: Mistake in "#safer" example in "Problems with -exec and
280 filenames" section of the Texinfo manual.
282 #28824: Corrected error message for "-ctime x".
283 Likewise for -gid, -inum, -links, -mmin, -cmin, -amin,
284 -uid, -used, -atime, -mtime, -ctime.
286 #27975: Infinite loop for -exec [..] {} +.
288 #27846: Assertion failure in xargs.c on AIX.
290 #27375: Open file descriptors leak into child processes.
292 #27017: find -D opt / -fstype ext3 -print , -quit coredumps
294 #27328: segfault if the initial exec for "find -exec" fails.
296 #27017: find -D opt / -fstype ext3 -print , -quit coredumps.
298 #26868: compilation error in pred.c on Solaris x86_64
300 #24873: Duplicate fprint option corrupts output
302 #23920: warn about un-matchable -path arguments ending in /.
304 #19120: Patch to fix single quotes in man page find(1)
306 ** Documentation Changes
308 #26327: xargs man page is vague about the number of times command is executed.
310 * Major changes in release 4.5.5, 2009-07-06
312 xargs now handles the case where the system's actual exec limits are
313 smaller than the value of ARG_MAX at compile time. Very few platforms
314 normally have this property, but it is possible to configure some Unix
319 #25359: files/testsuite/find.gnu/posix-h.exp tests fail
321 #26587: Fix a typo in -execdir documentation (it says -exec by mistake
324 #26537: find -prune now makes sure it has valid stat() information.
326 #22708: Exit status 126 and 127 from the utility invoked from xargs
327 now makes xargs return 123, meaning that exit status values 126 and
328 127 now unambigously mean that the utility could not be run or could
329 not be found, respectively.
331 ** Documentation Changes
333 The -wholename option to find is no longer preferred over -ipath.
336 * Major changes in release 4.5.4, 2009-03-10
338 ** Performance changes
340 The ftsfind executable (which is built by default as "find") now calls
341 fts() in such a way that it avoids calling stat() on directory
342 entries, if it doesn't need the information. This can produce a
343 significant speedup on filesystems which don't populate the d_type
344 element of struct dirent, for example reiserfs. Anecdotal evidence
345 suggests this can speed updatedb up from about 30 minutes to 3-4
348 The ftsfind executable also now avoids calling stat() functions to
349 discover the inode number of a file, if we already read this
350 information from the directory. This does provide a speed-up, but
351 only for a restricted set of commands such as "find . -inum 4001".
352 This fix is listed below as bug #24342.
356 #25764: remove duplicate entry for 'proc' in updatedb's $PRUNEFS.
358 #25359: find -H wrongly behaves like -L sometimes; this bug affects
359 only filesystems which populate d_type and affects -type and -printf
360 %y. This does not affect the default behaviour of find or find -P.
362 #25144: Misleading error message when argument to find -user is an
363 unknown user or is missing.
365 #25154: Allow compilation with C compilers that don't allow
366 declarations to follow statements.
368 #24342: -inum predicate shoud use dirent.d_ino instead of stat.st_ino
369 (this is a performance bug).
373 Updated translations for Bulgarian, German, Irish, Hungarian,
374 Lithuanian, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukranian,
377 ** Documentation Changes
379 The file README-CVS has been renamed to README-hacking and improved.
381 * Major changes in release 4.5.3, 2008-12-07
385 #24283: find-4.5.2 -printf %TY causes NULL pointer dereference
387 ** Performance changes
389 Changes to gnulib's fts code should provide performance improvements
390 in find when processing very large directories (for example
391 directories containing significantly more than 10000 filenames).
392 Performance imporvements may only exist for some find command lines
393 (performance testing was done for the fts implementation itself but
394 we haven't done the analogous performance tests in find).
396 File type information is also passed back from fts to find, saving
397 calls to the stat system call for find command lines which don't need
398 the stat information. This provides a performance improvement for
399 common cases like "find . -type d".
401 * Major changes in release 4.5.2, 2008-09-07
405 #24169: find would segfault if the -newerXY test was not followed by
408 #23996: integer overflow on some platforms when parsing "-used 3".
410 ** Documentation Enhancements
412 #23070: Corrected manpage description of find -perm /000 (the change
413 was already made but the manpage indicated the change would happen
418 Updated translation: French, Indonesian.
419 New translation: Czech.
421 * Major changes in release 4.5.1, 2008-06-21
425 #22662: find -printf %AX appends nanoseconds in the right place now.
427 #23663: crash in some locales for -printf %AX (this problem seems to
428 have affected only the CVS code, and not any public releases).
432 New translation: Lithuanian.
434 Updated translations: Chinese (simplified).
436 ** Documentation Enhancements
438 Added a worked example describing how to find the shallowest instances
439 of a given directory name (or names) in a directory hierarchy.
441 * Major changes in release 4.5.0, 2008-05-21
443 ** Functional Enhancements to find
445 If the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, the system's
446 definition of "yes" and "no" responses are used to interpret the
447 response to questions from -ok and -okdir. The default is still to
448 use information from the findutils message translations.
452 If xargs find that exec fails because the argument size limit it
453 calculated is larger than the system's actual maximum, it now adapts
454 by passing fewer arguments (as opposed to failing).
456 ** Performance changes
458 The default optimisation level for find is now -O2 instead of -O0,
459 meaning that a number of additional optimisations are performed by
460 default. Current optimisations at each level are:
462 0: Perform -name, -path, -iname, -ipath before other checks.
463 1: Expressions containing only cost-free tests are evaluated
464 before expressions which contain more costly tests.
465 2: Bring forward all tests that need to know the type of a file
466 but don't need to stat it.
467 3: All tests are ordered by their estimated cost.
469 Cost here is simply an estimate of how time consuming the I/O
470 operations needed to make a test are.
475 #22662: nanoseconds wrongly appended after "PM" for find -printf %AX
476 in locale en_US.UTF-8.
478 #15472: Error messages that print ino_t values are no longer truncated
479 on platforms with 64-bit ino_t.
481 On some systems without support for a boolean type (for example some
482 versions of the AIX C compiler), find's regular expression
483 implementation fails to support case-insensitive regular expression
484 matching, causing -iregex to behave like -regex. This is now fixed.
486 ** Documentation Changes
488 #20873: Indicate that * matches / and leading dot in filenames for
491 Both the Texinfo manual and the find manual page now include a more
492 precise description of how your locale configuration affects the
493 interpretation of regular expressions and how your response to prompts
494 from the -ok action are interpreted.
496 * Major changes in release 4.3.13, 2008-02-14
500 #22057: Actually rename the old locate database to the new one
501 atomically, instead of just claiming the rename is atomic in a
504 #22056: -Xtime tests are off by one second (e.g. rm -f x; touch x;
505 find x -mtime 0 should print x).
507 #21960: xargs should collect the exit status of child processes even if
508 the total count of unreaped children has not yet reached the maximum
511 ** Documentation Fixes
513 Documented various useful techniques with invoking "sh -c" from
514 xargs in the Texinfo documentation.
518 Updated the German, Irish, Dutch, Polish and Vietnamese translations.
521 * Major changes in release 4.3.12, 2007-12-19
525 #15384: Find misbehaves when parent directory is not readable.
527 ** Documentation Fixes
529 More examples in the xargs manual page, including a portable analogue
530 for BSD's "xargs -o".
534 Updated translations: Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Vietnamese.
537 * Major changes in release 4.3.11, 2007-12-02
539 ** Functional changes
541 When the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, "find -perm
542 +a+w" is rejected as invalid. Some other similar mode strings
543 starting with '+' which are not valid in POSIX are also rejected.
545 The -prune action now always evaluates as true (this is also a
551 #21568: Switch to checking the gnulib code out with native git, not
552 CVS. This affects mainly those who check findutils code out of CVS.
553 This is not the first time this bug has been fixed (the previous fix
554 used "cvs update -D", which git-cvspserver silently does not
557 #21039: Setting the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable now turns off
558 warnings by default, because POSIX requires that only diagnostic
559 messages (and -ok prompts) are printed on STDERR, and diagnostic
560 messages must also result in a nonzero exit status.
562 #20970: Trailing slash on directory arguments breaks -name. "find
563 foo/ -name foo" now correctly matches foo and printf foo/. See POSIX
564 interp http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/uploads/40/14959/AI-186.txt
566 #20865: Using both -delete and -prune without explicitly using -depth
567 is now an error. Traditionally, -delete has always turned -depth on
568 anyway, so this is not a functional change. However, using -depth
569 (implicitly or explicitly) makes -prune a no-op. This change is
570 intended to avoid nasty surprises for people who test with
571 "-print" and then change it to "-delete" when they are happy.
573 #20803: POSIX requires that -prune always returns true. Previously it
574 returned false when -depth was in effect and true otherwise.
576 #20802: If -delete fails, find's exit status will now be non-zero.
577 However, find still skips trying to delete ".".
579 ** Documentation Fixes
580 #21635: Some of the documentation files had missing copying
581 conditions. The missing files now have copying headers, and these
582 are compatible with each other (GNU FDL 1.2).
584 #21634: No copy of FDL 1.2 included with the source code
586 #21633: Missing copyright/license header in some documentation.
588 #21628: find -perm /000 matches all files rather than none, since
589 findutils-4.3.3. The Texinfo documentation is now consistent with the
590 manual page on this point.
592 #21270: Formatting fixes to the xargs.1 manual page, including making
593 options bold instead of italic and making OPTIONS a section header
594 rather than a subsection.
596 * Major changes in release 4.3.10, 2007-11-13
600 #21568: findutils gnulib code does not match the date in
601 import-gnulib.config. We now check out the gnulib code via
604 * Major changes in release 4.3.9, 2007-11-11
608 Findutils version 4.3.9 is released under version 3 of the GNU General
613 #20834: Avoid segmentation violation for -execdir when $PATH is
614 unset. Assume that the PATH is safe in this situation.
616 #20310: configure uses hosts's support status for "sort -z" when
617 generating the updatedb script for use on the target. This is
618 inappropriate when cross-compiling, so avoid doing that.
620 #20263: Compilation fix for DEC Alpha OSF/1 cc, which forbids the
621 ordering comparison of function pointers.
623 #20139: find -[acm]time -N (wrongly) includes files from N days ago,
624 as well as (correctly) from less than N days ago.
626 #20273: When xargs is successful without consuming all of stdin (for
627 example, with the -E option), and stdin is seekable, xargs now
628 correctly restores the file position, even on platforms where exit()
629 does not follow the POSIX rules of doing likewise. Likewise for find
630 (for example, with the -ok action).
632 #20547: The version information printed by find, xargs, locate,
633 updatedb, frcode and code now complies with the GNU Project's coding
636 #20662: Avoid memory leak in find -name and other places affected by
637 gnulib dirname module. The leak had been present since 4.3.1.
639 #20751: Avoid memory corruption in find -ls that has been present
642 #20871: Assertion failure introduced in 4.3.3, when oldfind is invoked
643 in a directory where the parent directory lacks search permission.
647 #20594: Allow fine-tuning of the default argument size used by xargs
648 and find at ./configure time.
650 #20688: The warning printed by -name or -iname when the pattern to
651 match contains a slash can now be silenced by -nowarn. This warning
652 was originally introduced unconditionally in 4.2.21.
654 Translation of locate --limit problems is improved.
656 POSIX will standardise -path, so the documentation no longer claims
657 that -wholename is the 'canonical' test, and -ipath no longer
660 ** Documentation Fixes
662 Point out more explicitly that the subsecond timestamp support
663 introduced by findutils-4.3.3 introduces a change in the format of
666 Also explain that when reporting a bug, you should check the most
667 recent findutils release first.
669 Introduced doc/find-maint.texi, a maintenance manual for findutils.
671 Added an extra worked example for find (copying a subset of files).
673 The locate command's manual page now has a HISTORY section.
675 #20951: Very bad/unclear/confusing documentation of security checks in
678 #20865: Better documentation on the fact that -delete implies -depth
679 and that -delete interacts badly with -prune.
681 #20552: Fixed typos, formatting and section ordering issues in the
684 #20529: removed spurious 'o' in description of "xargs -a" in
687 #20232: The --max-database-age option of locate was added in release
688 4.3.3, but this file (NEWS) did not previously mention this fact.
692 Updated Dutch translation.
695 * Major changes in release 4.3.8, 2007-06-12
699 #20157: Avoid segfault in locate when run as root. This is caused by
700 a buffer overrun, but at this time no exploit mechanism is known.
702 * Major changes in release 4.3.7, 2007-06-09
704 ** Functional changes
706 Locate can now read old-format locate databases generated on machines
707 with a different byte order. It does this by guessing the byte order,
708 so the result is not completely reliable. If you need to share
709 databases between machines of different architectures, you should use
710 the LOCATE02 format (which has other advantages, as explained in the
715 #20014: Findutils-4.3.7 includes a patch for a potential security
716 problem in locate. When locate read an old-format database, it read
717 file names into a fixed-length buffer allocated on the heap without
718 checking for overflow. Although overflowing a heap buffer is often
719 somewhat safer than overflowing a buffer on the stack, this bug still
720 has potential security implications.
722 This bug also affected the following previous findutils releases:
724 - All releases prior to 4.2.31
725 - Findutils 4.3.0 to 4.3.6.
727 This bug has been assigned CVE number CVE-2007-2452.
731 #20128: Fix compilation error of find/tree.c on AIX with GCC.
733 #20005: Tests -mtime -n and -mtime +n incorrectly treated like -mtime n.
735 #19983: include_next causes compilation failure in findutils 4.3.6 on
738 #19981: Don't call setgroups if the function isn't available. This
739 fixes Savannah bug# 19981.
741 #19980: Don't use the functions putw() or getw() since these are not
742 in current POSIX. Use the gnulib version of wcwidth() where the
743 system does not provide it.
745 #19979: Compilation errors on BeOS
747 #19970: Cannot cast from pointer to bool using gnulib's <stdbool.h>
749 #19967: Use of __attribute((__noreturn__)) makes compilation fail with
750 some non-GCC compilers
752 #19966: find should link against -lm for modf() and fabs()
754 #19965: Compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0; non-declaration of uintmax_t
756 #19948: Assertion failure O_NOFOLLOW != 0 on IRIX 6.5
758 #19871: Typos in find.1
760 #19596: Fixed this bug again, this time in the Texinfo manual (the
761 discussion should compare %b with %s/512, not %s/1024).
763 #19416: _FORTIFY_SOURCE warn_unused_result warnings
765 * Major changes in release 4.3.6, 2007-05-21
769 #19948: Fixed an assertion failure on IRIX 6.5 (O_NOFOLLOW is defined
772 #19923: Fixed an array overrun in groups[] array of 'locate' when run by
773 or as root. This bug appears not to be exploitable. If locate is not
774 installed setuid, the bug is not exploitable. For setuid
775 installations, it is concievable that there could be an information
776 leak if the user uses the -d option or the -e option, though the
777 maintainer has been unable to provoke this on an x86 system.
779 #19871: Spurious .R directives in manpage produced error messages from
780 GNU troff. This is now fixed (they are corrected to .B).
782 #19416: The result of I/O operations in print-related actions is now
783 checked, and failures are reported. Any failure will cause find's
784 exit status to be nonzero. The predicate itself will continue to
789 A variety of changes were made to allow compilation to succeed on
792 #19983: Now compiles on DEC C V5.9-005 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (or at
795 #19970: Compile correctly on C89 systems where the "_Bool" type is not
796 provided, taking into account the limitations of the gnulib
797 replacement for stdbool.h.
799 #19967: Build successfully with C compilers that don't support the GCC
800 construct __attribute__((__noreturn__)).
802 #19966: Findutils should now build on systems which have the modf()
803 and fabs() functions in the maths library, -lm. This includes some
804 versions of HP-UX and Solaris.
806 #19965: Fixed a compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0 (no definition of the
810 * Major changes in release 4.3.5, 2007-05-05
812 ** Functional changes
814 Updatedb can now support he generation of file name databases which
815 are compatible with slocate. For some time, GNU locate has been able
818 The /proc filesystem is excluded from the locate database (by
819 default; change PRUNEPATHS to modify this behaviour).
823 #19806: The -samefile predicate might get fooled by inode reuse. We
824 now hold open a file descriptor on the reference file to prevent this.
826 #19768: Better detection of corrupted old-style locate databases
827 (e.g. if the database is too short to include a complete bigram
830 #19766: The frcode and code programs now detect write errors more
833 #19371: Fix compilation failure on systems which #define open to
834 open64 (and similarly with the close system call). This fixes
835 Savannah bug #19371, affecting AIX 5.3.
837 #19658: When cross-compiling, "make clean" no longer deletes the
838 generated file doc/regexprops.texi, because there is no way to
841 #19391: When xargs knows that the system's actual exec limit is larger
842 than the compiled-in ARG_MAX, use the system's limit without
843 generating an assertion failure.
845 #18203: A duplicate report of bug #17478.
847 #17478: Error messages from find can garble the console.
849 #16378: Assertion failure if stat() returns 00000 as the mode
850 of a file. This apparently can happen occasionally with broken NFS
853 #11668: FreeBSD extensions for time specification are now
854 implemented. In fact, these were included in findutils-4.3.3. The
855 change was listed as a functional change (whcih it is) and this bug
856 report was not mentioned.
858 ** Documentation Fixes
860 The locatedb.5 manpage now documents the (default) LOCATE02 format
861 more clearly, and also documents the slocate database format.
863 The maximum and default values applying to the -s option of xargs are
864 now documented more clearly in the manual page.
866 * Major changes in release 4.3.4, 2007-04-21
870 #19634: Test suite now passes (again) if "." is on your $PATH.
872 #19619: Findutils builds once again on Cygwin.
874 #19617: Nonexistent start points are (once again) diagnosed in
875 ftsfind. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
877 #19616: Fix leaf optimisation and loop detection (which were
878 unreliable in findutils 4.3.3). This bug affected only
881 #19615: find --version no longer claims to be using FTS_CWDFD when it
882 isn't. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
884 #19613: "find -L . -type f" no longer causes an assertion failure when
885 it encounters a symbolic link loop. This bug affected only
888 #19605: Issue an error message (and later return nonzero exit status)
889 if a symbolic link loop was encountered during directory traversal.
891 #19484: bigram.c and code.c fail if the first pathname recorded begins
894 #19483: Inconsistent option highlighting in updatedb manpage
896 #18414: Tests for "find -readable" are skipped for the superuser, as
897 on some systems (e.g. Cygwin with an Administrative user) users can
902 Findutils 4.3.4 includes a translation for the Ukrainian language.
905 * Major changes in release 4.3.3, 2007-04-15
907 Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15.
911 #19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s
912 (the divisor is 512 not 1024).
914 #18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not
917 #18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input
918 line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument.
920 #18554: Documented the construct -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} +
922 #18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+"
923 to just one argument for the time being. There is a performance
924 penalty for doing this. We hope to make a better fix in a later
927 #18384: excess bracket in xargs --help
929 #18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning
931 #17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such
932 as-u+w,a+X). This change actually occurred in findutils-4.3.2, but
933 the NEWS file for that release didn't mention it.
935 #17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part
936 (see "Functional changes" below)
938 #14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an
941 #14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate
942 -i") for multibyte character environments such as UTF-8. Previously,
943 if your search string contained a character which was outside the
944 single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the
945 case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be
950 ** Functional changes
952 The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S,
953 which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file.
955 The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files. For
956 over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that
957 this change will happen. We now issue a warning indicating that the
958 change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make
959 this change in the 4.2.x series).
961 The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin,
962 -cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second timestamps, including
963 the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments.
965 The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second timestamps:
974 The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for
975 files. One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted
976 X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose
977 name id the argument. X and Y can be:
980 B Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported)
983 t Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison
984 against a file status time, the argument is a time string.
987 For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if
988 the file being considered was accessed more recently than the
989 reference file was modified. The -newerXY test supports subsecond
990 timestamps where these are available. The X=B variant is not yet
993 If you configure the source code and then run the tests with "make
994 check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the
997 A new option, --max-database-age, has been added to locate.
1000 * Major changes in release 4.3.2, 2006-11-25
1004 #18222: find -printf '%H %P' once again prints the right result if
1005 more than one start point was given on the command line.
1007 #17782: find -execdir now correctly puts the prefix "./" before the
1008 expansion of "{}" rather than at the start of the argument it appears
1009 in. Please note that if you use the -exec or -execdir actions with a
1010 shell, then you may be vulnerable to shell code injection attacks, so
1011 don't do that. It's not a security defect in find - you should not be
1012 passing untrusted data (such as file names chosen by other people) to
1015 #17490: find -regex generated a segfault in findutils-4.3.1, but this
1016 is fixed in findutils-4.3.2.
1018 #17477: find -printf '%' (that is, where the format has a trailing %)
1019 now generates an error message.
1021 #17372: The fts-based find executable (the default configuration uses
1022 fts) is now much faster when -maxdepth is used on filesystems with
1025 #15531: The -prune action now behaves correctly when applied to a file.
1027 ** Functional changes
1029 The slocate database format is now supported. Preliminary changes
1030 intended to eventually allow setuid operation of locate have also been
1031 made. For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a
1032 set-user-ID program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please
1033 make sure that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate
1036 Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security
1037 mode (at the moment, GNU updatedb will not do this) forces locate's
1038 "-e" option to be turned on, which has an effect on the "-S" option
1039 which is probably surprising for most users.
1042 ** Documentation Fixes
1044 The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now
1045 explained more clearly in the manual page. Savannah bug #15360.
1048 * Major changes in release 4.3.1, 2006-08-06
1052 Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
1053 expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
1054 in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
1055 expression. (Savannah bug #15235).
1057 You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
1058 which have missing expressions, such as
1065 Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
1066 directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
1067 the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
1068 directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
1069 specified the wrong directory).
1071 Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have
1072 a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec
1073 action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since
1074 the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the
1075 problem was worse for -exec.
1077 Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user
1078 whose login shell is not actually a shell.
1080 There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
1081 Savannah bug #16269).
1083 ** Functional changes
1085 For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
1086 option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information
1087 about find's internal state and progress.
1089 The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
1090 happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print").
1092 ** Performance Enhancements
1094 Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of
1095 the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
1096 is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
1097 each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for
1098 example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not
1099 yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
1100 optimisation level. To see this in action, try
1101 find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
1102 and compare the optimised query with:
1103 find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
1105 find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
1107 Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
1108 will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have
1109 always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
1114 Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
1116 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
1117 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
1118 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
1119 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
1120 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
1121 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian
1123 * Major changes in release 4.3.0, 2005-12-12
1125 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
1126 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
1127 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
1128 may change or go away.
1130 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
1131 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
1133 ** Functional Changes
1135 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
1136 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
1137 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
1139 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
1140 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
1142 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
1143 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
1145 With fts Without fts
1146 default configuration find oldfind
1147 configure --with-fts find oldfind
1148 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
1150 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
1151 can be read, written or executed respectively.
1153 * Major changes in release 4.2.27, 2005-12-06
1155 ** Warnings of Future Changes
1157 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
1158 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
1159 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
1160 message is given if you do this.
1164 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
1165 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
1166 from the operating system.
1168 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
1169 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
1170 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
1172 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
1173 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
1174 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
1176 ** Documentation Changes
1178 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
1179 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
1182 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
1183 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
1185 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
1186 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
1189 * Major changes in release 4.2.26, 2005-11-19
1191 ** Public Service Announcements
1193 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
1194 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
1195 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
1196 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
1198 ** Functional Changes
1200 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
1201 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
1202 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
1204 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
1205 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
1206 information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error
1207 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
1208 not spuriously fail.
1210 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
1211 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
1212 option, which changes other semantics too).
1216 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
1217 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
1219 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
1220 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
1221 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
1222 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
1223 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
1224 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
1225 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
1226 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
1227 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
1228 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
1230 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
1231 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
1232 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
1233 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
1234 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
1235 containing 35396 entries.
1237 ** Documentation Changes
1239 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
1240 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
1242 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
1243 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
1245 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
1248 * Major changes in release 4.2.25, 2005-09-03
1252 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
1253 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
1254 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
1256 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
1257 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
1258 of upper/lower case distinctions.
1260 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
1263 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
1264 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
1265 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
1269 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
1271 * Major changes in release 4.2.24, 2005-07-29
1273 ** Documentation Changes
1275 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
1276 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
1277 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
1279 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
1282 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
1283 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
1284 the command's standard input from stdin.
1286 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
1287 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
1289 ** Functional Changes
1291 *** Functional changes in locate
1293 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
1294 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
1295 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
1296 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
1297 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
1298 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
1299 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
1302 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
1303 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
1304 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
1307 *** Functional changes in find
1309 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
1310 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
1311 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
1312 recommended practice however).
1314 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
1315 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
1318 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
1319 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
1320 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
1321 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
1322 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
1323 HSFS implementation).
1327 *** Bug Fixes for find
1329 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
1330 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
1331 gnulib version of this function).
1333 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
1336 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
1337 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
1339 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
1340 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
1341 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
1342 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
1343 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
1344 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
1345 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
1347 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
1348 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
1349 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
1351 * Major changes in release 4.2.23, 2005-06-19
1353 ** Documentation Changes
1355 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
1358 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
1360 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
1362 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
1363 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
1364 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
1365 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
1368 * Major changes in release 4.2.22, 2005-06-12
1372 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
1373 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
1374 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
1375 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
1376 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
1377 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
1378 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
1382 None in this release.
1384 ** Functional Changes to locate
1386 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
1387 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
1388 later instances are ignored.
1390 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
1391 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
1392 one or more patterns.
1394 ** Documentation Changes
1396 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
1397 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
1398 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
1399 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
1400 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
1403 * Major changes in release 4.2.21, 2005-06-07
1404 ** Functional Changes to find
1406 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
1407 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
1408 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
1409 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
1411 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
1412 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
1413 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
1414 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
1415 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
1416 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
1419 ** Functional Changes to locate
1421 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
1422 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
1423 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
1424 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
1425 different set of results).
1427 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
1428 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
1431 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
1433 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
1434 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
1436 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
1437 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
1439 * Major changes in release 4.2.20, 2005-03-17
1440 ** Internationalization and Localization
1441 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
1444 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
1445 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
1447 * Major changes in release 4.2.19, 2005-03-07
1450 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
1451 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
1452 (Savannah bug #12044).
1454 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
1455 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
1456 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
1459 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
1460 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
1462 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
1463 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
1464 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
1465 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
1466 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
1468 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
1470 ** Functionality Changes
1471 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
1472 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
1473 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
1475 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
1477 ** Documentation enhancements
1478 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
1480 ** Internationalization and Localization
1481 New Vietnamese message translation.
1483 * Major changes in release 4.2.18, 2005-02-16
1485 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
1486 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
1487 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
1488 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
1490 ** Documentation improvements
1491 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
1493 * Major changes in release 4.2.17, 2005-02-08
1495 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
1496 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
1497 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
1498 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
1499 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
1500 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
1503 * Major changes in release 4.2.16, 2005-02-05
1504 ** Functionality Changes
1505 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
1506 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
1508 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
1509 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
1510 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
1513 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
1516 * Major changes in release 4.2.15, 2005-01-29
1517 ** Functionality Changes
1518 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
1519 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
1521 * Major changes in release 4.2.14, 2005-01-25
1522 ** Functionality Changes
1523 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
1525 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
1526 distributed tar file more than once.
1527 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
1528 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
1529 ** Documentation improvements
1530 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
1532 * Major changes in release 4.2.13, 2005-01-23
1533 ** Performance Enhancements
1534 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
1535 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
1536 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
1537 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
1538 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
1540 * Major changes in release 4.2.12, 2005-01-22
1541 ** Functionality Changes
1542 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
1543 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
1544 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
1545 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
1546 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
1547 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
1548 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
1550 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
1551 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
1552 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
1554 * Major changes in release 4.2.11, 2004-12-12
1556 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
1557 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
1558 ** Functionality Changes
1559 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
1560 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
1561 a more helpful error message.
1562 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
1563 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
1564 statistics about the locate databases.
1565 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
1566 ** Documentation improvements
1567 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
1568 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
1570 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
1573 * Major changes in release 4.2.10, 2004-12-06
1575 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
1576 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
1579 * Major changes in release 4.2.9, 2004-12-05
1580 ** Functionality Changes
1581 *** xargs no longer treats a line containing only an underscore as a logical end-of-file. To obtain the behaviour that was previously the default, use "-E_".
1582 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
1583 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
1586 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
1587 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
1588 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
1590 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
1591 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
1592 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
1593 ** Documentation improvements
1594 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
1595 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
1597 * Major changes in release 4.2.8, 2004-11-24
1598 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
1599 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
1602 * Major changes in release 4.2.7, 2004-11-21
1603 ** Functionality Changes
1604 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
1605 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
1606 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
1607 ** Documentation improvements
1608 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
1609 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
1610 are not are explained in this chapter.
1612 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
1614 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
1616 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
1617 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
1619 * Major changes in release 4.2.6, 2004-11-21
1621 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
1622 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
1623 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
1624 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
1627 * Major changes in release 4.2.5, 2004-11-11
1628 ** Functionality Changes
1629 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
1630 find will follow symbolic links.
1631 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
1633 ** Documentation improvements
1634 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
1636 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
1637 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
1638 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
1639 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
1640 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
1641 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
1642 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
1644 * Major changes in release 4.2.4, 2004-11-08
1645 ** Functionality Changes
1646 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
1647 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
1649 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
1650 doesn't support that much).
1651 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
1652 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
1653 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
1654 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
1655 by the use of the -nowarn option.
1656 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
1657 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
1658 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
1659 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
1661 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
1662 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
1663 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
1664 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
1665 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
1666 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
1667 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
1668 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
1669 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
1670 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
1671 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
1673 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
1674 systems that have non-writable string constants.
1675 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
1676 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
1677 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
1679 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
1681 * Major changes in release 4.2.3, 2004-10-30
1682 ** Functionality Changes
1683 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
1684 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
1685 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
1686 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
1687 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
1688 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
1689 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
1690 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
1691 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
1692 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
1693 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
1694 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
1695 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
1696 directory we've just returned out of).
1698 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
1700 * Major changes in release 4.2.2, 2004-10-24
1701 ** Documentation improvements
1702 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
1704 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
1705 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
1706 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
1708 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
1709 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
1711 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
1712 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
1713 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
1714 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
1716 * Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17
1718 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
1719 requires it, as explained at
1720 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
1722 * Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17
1724 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
1725 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
1726 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
1727 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
1728 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
1730 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
1732 * Major changes in release 4.2.0, 2003-06-14
1733 ** Functionality Changes
1734 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
1735 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
1736 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
1737 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
1738 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
1739 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
1740 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
1741 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
1742 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
1743 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
1744 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
1745 find stats the file. There is also an option
1746 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
1747 ** Documentation improvements
1748 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
1749 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
1750 The find manual page also now includes a section
1751 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
1752 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
1753 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
1754 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
1755 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
1756 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
1758 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
1760 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
1761 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
1762 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
1763 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
1764 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
1765 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
1766 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
1767 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
1768 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
1769 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
1770 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
1771 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
1772 database if it fails.
1773 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
1774 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
1776 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
1777 This was broken in 4.1.20.
1779 * Major changes in release 4.1.20, 2003-06-14:
1780 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
1781 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
1783 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
1784 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
1785 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
1786 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
1788 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
1790 * Major changes in release 4.1.7, 2001-05-20:
1791 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
1792 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
1794 * Major changes in release 4.1.6, 2000-10-10:
1795 correct bug in prune.
1796 added --ignore-case option for locate
1798 * Major changes in release 4.1.5, 2000-04-12:
1799 Add support for large files
1801 * Major changes in release 4.1.4, 2000-02-26:
1802 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
1804 * Major changes in release 4.1.3, 2000-01-27:
1805 added internationalization and localization.
1807 * Major changes in release 4.1.2, 2000-01-18:
1810 * Major changes in release 4.1.1, 1999-08-8:
1811 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
1812 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
1814 * Major changes in release 4.1, 1994-11-3:
1816 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
1817 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
1818 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
1819 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
1821 * Major changes in release 4.0, 1994-11-2:
1825 *** Man page for updatedb.
1826 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
1829 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
1830 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
1831 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
1832 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
1833 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
1834 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
1837 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
1838 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
1839 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
1840 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
1841 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
1842 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
1844 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
1847 *** Takes command-line options.
1850 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
1851 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
1852 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
1854 * Major changes in release 3.8, 1993-03-29:
1856 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
1857 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
1858 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
1860 * Major changes in release 3.7:
1862 ** locate can search multiple databases
1863 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
1864 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
1866 * No NEWS was kept for earlier releases. Known release dates include:
1867 ** release 3.2, 1991-08-28
1868 ** release 3.1, 1991-08-21
1869 ** release 3.0, 1991-08-21
1870 ** release 2.2, 1991-04-05
1871 ** release 2.1, 1991-01-01
1872 ** release 2.0, 1990-11-20
1873 ** release 1.2, 1990-07-03
1874 ** release 1.1, 1990-06-24
1875 ** release 1.0, 1990-06-22
1876 ** beginning of findutils history, 1987-02-21
1879 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
1881 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
1882 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
1883 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
1884 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
1885 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf
1887 Copyright (C) 1996, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007,
1888 2008, 2009, 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
1890 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
1891 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
1892 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
1893 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
1894 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
1895 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.