1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp, mv, and install no longer issue spurious diagnostics like "failed
8 to preserve ownership" when copying to GNU/Linux CIFS file systems.
9 They do this by working around some Linux CIFS bugs.
11 join and uniq now support multi-byte characters better.
12 For example, 'join -tX' now works even if X is a multi-byte character,
13 and both programs now treat multi-byte characters like U+3000
14 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE as blanks if the current locale treats them so.
16 numfmt options like --suffix no longer have an arbitrary 127-byte limit.
17 [bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]
19 mktemp with --suffix now better diagnoses templates with too few X's.
20 Previously it conflated the insignificant --suffix in the error.
21 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
23 sort again handles thousands grouping characters in single-byte locales
24 where the grouping character is greater than CHAR_MAX. For e.g. signed
25 character platforms with a 0xA0 (aka  ) grouping character.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
28 split --line-bytes with a mixture of very long and short lines
29 no longer overwrites the heap (CVE-2024-0684).
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
32 tail no longer mishandles input from files in /proc and /sys file systems,
33 on systems with a page size larger than the stdio BUFSIZ.
34 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
36 timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might kill arbitrary
37 processes after a failed process fork.
38 [bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]
40 timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might fail to
41 kill monitored processes immediately after forking them.
42 [bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]
44 wc no longer fails to count unprintable characters as parts of words.
45 [bug introduced in textutils-2.1]
47 ** Changes in behavior
49 base32 and base64 no longer require padding when decoding.
50 Previously an error was given for non padded encoded data.
52 base32 and base64 have improved detection of corrupted encodings.
53 Previously encodings with non zero padding bits were accepted.
55 basenc --base16 -d now supports lower case hexadecimal characters.
56 Previously an error was given for lower case hex digits.
58 cp --no-clobber, and mv -n no longer exit with failure status if
59 existing files are encountered in the destination. Instead they revert
60 to the behavior from before v9.2, silently skipping existing files.
62 ls --dired now implies long format output without hyperlinks enabled,
63 and will take precedence over previously specified formats or hyperlink mode.
65 numfmt will accept lowercase 'k' to indicate Kilo or Kibi units on input,
66 and uses lowercase 'k' when outputting such units in '--to=si' mode.
68 pinky no longer tries to canonicalize the user's login location by default,
69 rather requiring the new --lookup option to enable this often slow feature.
71 wc no longer ignores encoding errors when counting words.
72 Instead, it treats them as non white space.
76 chgrp now accepts the --from=OWNER:GROUP option to restrict changes to files
77 with matching current OWNER and/or GROUP, as already supported by chown(1).
79 chmod adds support for -h, -H,-L,-P, and --dereference options, providing
80 more control over symlink handling. This supports more secure handling of
81 CLI arguments, and is more consistent with chown, and chmod on other systems.
83 cp now accepts the --keep-directory-symlink option (like tar), to preserve
84 and follow existing symlinks to directories in the destination.
86 cp and mv now accept the --update=none-fail option, which is similar
87 to the --no-clobber option, except that existing files are diagnosed,
88 and the command exits with failure status if existing files.
89 The -n,--no-clobber option is best avoided due to platform differences.
91 od now supports printing IEEE half precision floating point with -t fH,
92 or brain 16 bit floating point with -t fB, where supported by the compiler.
94 tail now supports following multiple processes, with repeated --pid options.
98 cp,mv,install,cat,split now read and write a minimum of 256KiB at a time.
99 This was previously 128KiB and increasing to 256KiB was seen to increase
100 throughput by 10-20% when reading cached files on modern systems.
102 env,kill,timeout now support unnamed signals. kill(1) for example now
103 supports sending such signals, and env(1) will list them appropriately.
105 SELinux operations in file copy operations are now more efficient,
106 avoiding unneeded MCS/MLS label translation.
108 sort no longer dynamically links to libcrypto unless -R is used.
109 This decreases startup overhead in the typical case.
111 wc is now much faster in single-byte locales and somewhat faster in
115 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.4 (2023-08-29) [stable]
119 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
120 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
121 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
123 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
124 presented with malformed checksum lines.
125 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
127 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
128 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
129 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
131 'cp --sparse=never' will avoid copy-on-write (reflinking) and copy offloading,
132 to ensure no holes present in the destination copy.
133 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
135 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
136 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
138 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
139 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
140 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
141 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
143 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
144 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
145 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
147 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
148 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
150 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
151 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
152 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
154 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
155 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
156 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
158 pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
159 platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
160 Also see the new --enable-systemd option mentioned below.
161 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
163 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
164 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
166 shred again operates on Solaris when built for 64 bits.
167 Previously it would have exited with a "getrandom: Invalid argument" error.
168 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
170 tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
171 erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
172 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
174 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD,
175 and is being built again on FreeBSD and Haiku.
176 [bugs introduced in coreutils-9.2]
178 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
179 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
180 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
182 ** Changes in behavior
184 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
185 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
186 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
188 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
189 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
190 checksum utilities with cksum.
192 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
193 Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
194 where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
195 Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
196 Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
197 [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
201 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
202 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
203 reinstating that behavior from coreutils-9.0.
205 comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
206 write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
208 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
209 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
211 split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
213 tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
215 'who -a' now displays the boot time on Alpine Linux, OpenBSD,
216 Cygwin, Haiku, and some Android distributions
218 'uptime' now succeeds on some Android distributions, and now counts
219 VM saved/sleep time on GNU (Linux, Hurd, kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD,
222 On GNU/Linux platforms where utmp-format files have 32-bit timestamps,
223 pinky, uptime, and who can now work for times after the year 2038,
224 so long as systemd is installed, you configure with a new, experimental
225 option --enable-systemd, and you use the programs without file arguments.
226 (For example, with systemd 'who /var/log/wtmp' does not work because
227 systemd does not support the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp.)
230 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
234 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
235 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
236 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
237 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
238 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
240 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
241 Previously it may have issued "File exists" errors when
242 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
243 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
245 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
246 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
247 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
249 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
250 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
251 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
252 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
254 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
255 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
257 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
258 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
259 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
261 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
262 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
263 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
264 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
266 ** Changes in behavior
268 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
269 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
270 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
271 due to -n, -i, or -u.
275 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
276 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
277 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
280 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
284 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
285 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
286 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
287 total line in this case.
288 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
290 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
291 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
292 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
294 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
295 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
297 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
298 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
299 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
300 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
302 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
303 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
304 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
305 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
306 which may have resulted in data corruption.
307 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
309 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
310 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
311 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
313 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
314 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
316 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
317 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
318 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
320 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
321 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
322 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
324 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
325 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
326 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
328 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
329 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
330 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
331 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
332 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
334 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
335 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
336 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
337 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
338 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
340 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
341 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
342 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
344 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
345 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
346 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
348 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
349 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
350 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
351 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
353 ** Changes in behavior
355 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
356 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
357 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
358 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
359 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
360 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
362 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
363 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
365 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
366 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
367 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
368 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
370 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
371 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
372 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
374 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
375 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
376 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
377 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
379 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
380 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
381 This behavior is now documented.
383 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
384 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
386 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
387 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
388 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
390 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
391 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
392 from errors from the invoked command.
394 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
395 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
396 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
399 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
403 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
404 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
406 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
407 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
409 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
410 print details on how a file is being copied.
412 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
413 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
415 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
416 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
418 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
419 asked to move a file to a different file system.
421 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
422 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
424 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
425 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
427 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
428 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
432 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
433 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
434 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
435 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
436 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
438 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
439 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
441 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
442 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
444 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
445 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
446 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
448 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
449 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
450 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
452 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
453 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
455 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
456 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
457 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
458 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
461 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
465 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
466 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
467 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
469 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
470 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
471 before adjusting it to the correct value.
472 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
474 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
475 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
476 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
478 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
479 and B is in some other file system.
480 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
482 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
483 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
484 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
486 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
487 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
489 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
490 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
491 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
492 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
493 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
495 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
496 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
499 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
500 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
501 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
503 ** Changes in behavior
505 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
506 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
507 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
509 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
510 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
511 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
512 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
514 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
515 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
517 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
518 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
519 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
521 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
522 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
524 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
525 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
526 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
527 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
528 though they still work.
530 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
531 capabilities are rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
532 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
534 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
535 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
537 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
538 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
539 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
541 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
542 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
543 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
544 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
548 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
549 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
551 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
552 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
554 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
555 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
559 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
560 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
562 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
563 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
564 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
567 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
569 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
570 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
571 since synchronizing can take a long time.
573 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
575 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
576 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
578 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
580 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
581 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
582 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
586 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
587 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
590 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
594 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
595 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
597 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
598 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
599 is a non regular file.
600 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
602 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
603 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
604 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
606 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
607 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
609 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
610 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
612 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
613 heavily changed during the run.
614 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
616 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
617 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
619 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
620 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
622 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstattable files.
623 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
625 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
626 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
628 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
629 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
630 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
632 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
633 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
635 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
636 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
638 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
639 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
640 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
642 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
643 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
644 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
646 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
647 invalid combinations of case character classes.
648 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
650 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
651 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
652 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
654 ** Changes in behavior
656 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
657 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
659 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
660 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
661 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
663 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
664 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
665 that was made in release 8.32.
667 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
668 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
669 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
671 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
672 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
674 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
675 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
679 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
680 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
681 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
682 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
684 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
686 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
687 when verifying tagged format checksums.
689 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
691 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
692 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
694 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
695 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
697 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
698 NUL instead of newline.
700 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
702 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
703 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
704 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
708 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
709 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
711 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
712 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
713 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
715 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
716 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
718 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
719 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
721 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
722 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
724 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
725 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
726 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
728 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
730 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
731 where avx2 instructions are supported.
732 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
735 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
739 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
740 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
741 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
743 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
744 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
745 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
746 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
747 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
749 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
750 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
751 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
752 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
753 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
754 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
756 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
757 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
759 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
760 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
761 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
762 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
764 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
765 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
766 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
767 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
769 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
770 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
772 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
773 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
774 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
775 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
777 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
778 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
779 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
781 ** Changes in behavior
783 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
784 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
785 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
786 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
787 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
790 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
791 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
792 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
793 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
794 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
795 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
796 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
797 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
800 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
801 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
802 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
803 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
805 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
806 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
807 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
809 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
810 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
814 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
815 file creation time, where available.
817 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
818 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
820 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
821 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
822 useful on network file systems.
826 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
827 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
829 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
830 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
831 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
835 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
838 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
842 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
843 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
845 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
846 after asking the user whether to proceed.
847 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
849 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
850 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
852 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
853 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
854 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
856 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
857 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
858 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
859 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
860 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
861 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
863 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
864 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
866 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
867 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
869 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
870 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
871 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
873 ** Changes in behavior
875 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
876 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
877 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
878 end-of-options marker.
880 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
883 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
884 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
886 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
887 environment variable is set.
889 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
890 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
891 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
892 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
893 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
895 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
897 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
898 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
899 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
900 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
902 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
903 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
907 id now supports specifying multiple users.
909 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
910 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
912 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
913 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
914 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
915 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
916 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
917 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
919 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
920 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
922 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
923 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
925 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
926 signal handling before executing a program.
930 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
931 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
932 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
936 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
937 which is common in Asian locales.
939 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
940 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
942 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
943 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
946 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
950 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
951 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
952 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
953 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
954 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
955 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
957 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
958 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
959 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
960 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
962 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
963 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
964 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
965 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
966 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
967 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
969 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
970 even if it can't be traversed.
971 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
973 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
974 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
975 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
977 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
978 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
980 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
981 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
982 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
983 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
984 now silently does nothing if A exists.
985 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
987 ** Changes in behavior
989 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
990 it is self referential.
992 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
996 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
998 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
999 each processing step.
1001 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
1002 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
1005 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
1006 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
1007 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
1009 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
1010 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
1014 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
1015 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
1017 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
1018 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
1019 and tail -f uses inotify.
1021 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
1022 which is especially significant on macOS.
1025 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
1029 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
1030 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
1032 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
1033 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
1034 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
1035 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
1037 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
1038 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1040 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
1041 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1043 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
1044 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
1045 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
1047 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
1048 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1050 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
1051 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
1052 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1054 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
1055 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
1056 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
1057 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
1058 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1062 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
1066 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
1068 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
1069 rather than reading from the start.
1071 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
1072 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
1073 for unknown long options.
1077 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
1078 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
1081 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
1085 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
1086 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
1087 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
1088 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1090 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
1091 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
1092 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
1093 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
1094 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1096 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
1097 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
1098 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
1099 now fails instead of losing the data.
1100 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1102 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
1103 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
1104 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1106 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
1107 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
1108 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1110 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
1111 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
1112 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1114 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
1115 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
1116 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1118 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
1119 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
1120 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1122 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
1123 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
1124 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
1126 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
1127 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
1128 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1130 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
1131 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
1132 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1134 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
1135 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1137 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
1138 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
1139 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1141 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
1142 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1144 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
1145 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
1146 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
1147 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1149 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
1150 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
1151 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1153 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
1154 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
1155 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1157 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
1158 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1162 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1163 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1164 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1166 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1167 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1169 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1170 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1172 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1173 executing the subsidiary program.
1175 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1177 ** Changes in behavior
1179 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1180 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1181 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1182 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1186 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1188 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1189 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1191 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1192 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1193 is effective in this case.
1196 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1200 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1201 as appropriate for the -a, --preserve=context, or -Z options.
1202 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1204 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1205 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1206 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1208 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1209 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1210 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1212 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1213 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1214 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1216 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1217 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1218 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1220 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1221 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1222 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1223 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1224 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1226 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1227 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1228 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1229 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1233 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1234 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1235 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1236 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1238 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1239 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1240 time zone is indeterminate.
1242 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1243 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1244 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1245 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1247 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1248 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1249 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1251 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1252 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1254 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1255 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1256 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1260 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1261 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1262 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1265 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1269 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1270 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1273 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1274 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1275 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1277 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1278 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1279 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1280 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1281 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1283 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1284 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1285 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1287 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1288 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1290 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1291 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1292 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1294 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1295 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1296 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1298 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1299 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1301 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1302 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1303 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1305 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1306 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1308 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1309 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1310 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1312 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1314 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1315 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1317 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1318 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1320 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1321 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1323 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1324 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1326 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1327 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1328 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1329 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1331 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1332 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1333 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1335 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1336 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1337 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1339 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1340 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1341 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1343 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1344 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1345 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1347 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1348 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1350 ** Changes in behavior
1352 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1354 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1355 values for any argument.
1357 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1358 they are out of localtime range.
1360 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1361 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1362 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1363 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1367 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1368 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1369 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1371 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1372 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1374 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1375 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1377 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1379 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1380 written to a terminal.
1382 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1383 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1385 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1386 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1387 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1388 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1389 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1390 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1391 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1392 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1393 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1394 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1395 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1397 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1398 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1402 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1403 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1407 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1409 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1410 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1412 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1415 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1419 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1420 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1421 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1422 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1424 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1425 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1427 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1428 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1429 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1431 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1432 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1434 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1435 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1436 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1438 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1439 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1441 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1442 that specify an offset for the first field.
1443 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1445 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1446 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1450 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1451 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1455 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1456 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1458 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1459 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1460 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1461 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1462 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1464 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1465 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1466 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1468 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1469 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1470 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1472 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1473 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1475 ** Changes in behavior
1477 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1478 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1480 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1481 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1483 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1484 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1486 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1487 when outputting to a terminal.
1489 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1493 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1494 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1496 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1497 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1499 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1500 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1501 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1503 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1504 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1506 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1507 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1508 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1510 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1512 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1513 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1514 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1516 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1517 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1520 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1524 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1525 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1527 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1528 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1530 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1531 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1532 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1534 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1535 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1536 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1537 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1539 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1540 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1541 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1542 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1544 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1545 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1547 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1548 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1550 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1551 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1552 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1554 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1555 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1556 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1558 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1559 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1560 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1562 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1563 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1564 character at the 4GiB position.
1565 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1567 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1568 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1570 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1571 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1573 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1574 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1575 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1577 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1578 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1580 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1581 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1582 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1584 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1585 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1587 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1588 when those files are being created or renamed.
1589 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1593 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1594 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1595 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1596 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1598 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1599 on stderr approximately every second.
1601 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1602 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1604 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1605 other than the default newline character.
1607 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1608 a useful setting with high latency links.
1610 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1611 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1613 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1614 and output errors in general.
1616 ** Changes in behavior
1618 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1619 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1620 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1621 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1623 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1624 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1625 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1626 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1627 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1629 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1630 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1632 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1634 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1635 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1637 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1638 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1642 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1643 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1645 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1646 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1648 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1649 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1651 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1652 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1654 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1656 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1657 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1658 documentation are provided.
1661 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1665 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1666 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1668 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1669 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1670 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1671 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1673 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1674 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1675 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1676 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1678 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1679 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1681 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1682 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1684 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1685 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1686 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1687 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1688 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1689 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1690 values are in octal.
1703 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1705 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1706 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1707 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1708 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1709 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1710 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1712 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1713 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1714 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1715 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1717 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1718 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1719 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1721 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1722 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1723 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1724 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1726 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1727 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1728 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1730 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1731 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1732 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1734 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1735 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1736 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1737 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1738 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1740 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1741 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1742 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1744 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1745 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1747 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1748 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1749 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1751 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1752 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1754 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1755 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1757 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1758 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1760 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1761 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1763 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1764 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1765 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1767 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1768 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1772 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1773 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1775 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1776 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1777 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1778 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1779 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1780 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1781 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1782 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1783 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1784 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1785 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1786 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1787 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1788 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1789 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1790 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1791 it suitable for embedded system.
1793 ** Changes in behavior
1795 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1796 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1798 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1799 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1801 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1802 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1803 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1805 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1806 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1807 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1811 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1812 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1813 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1815 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1817 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1818 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1819 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1821 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1822 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1823 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1824 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1826 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1827 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1829 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1830 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1831 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1834 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1838 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstattable
1839 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1840 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1842 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1843 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1844 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1845 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1847 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1848 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1849 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1851 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1852 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1854 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1856 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1857 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1858 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1860 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1861 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1862 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1864 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1865 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1866 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1867 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1869 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1870 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1871 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1873 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1874 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1875 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1877 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1878 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1880 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1881 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1882 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1883 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1885 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1886 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1887 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1889 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1890 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1891 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1895 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1896 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1897 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1899 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1900 used to identify the split points.
1902 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1903 command line argument through to the output.
1905 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1908 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1909 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1911 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1912 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1914 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1916 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1917 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1918 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1920 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1921 unique groups with empty lines.
1923 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1924 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1926 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1929 ** Changes in behavior
1931 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1932 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1933 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1934 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1936 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1937 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1939 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1940 not just the transfer counts.
1942 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1944 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1945 as per the documented interface.
1949 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1951 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1952 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1953 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1954 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1956 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1957 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1958 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1959 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1961 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1962 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1963 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1965 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1966 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1968 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1969 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1971 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1975 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1978 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1982 numfmt: reformat numbers
1986 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1987 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1988 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1990 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1991 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1992 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1994 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1995 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1999 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
2000 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2002 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
2003 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
2004 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2006 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
2007 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
2008 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2010 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
2011 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
2012 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2014 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
2015 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
2016 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
2018 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
2019 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
2020 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
2022 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
2023 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2025 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
2026 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
2028 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
2029 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
2030 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
2032 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
2033 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
2034 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2036 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
2037 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
2038 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2040 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
2041 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
2042 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
2043 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2045 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
2046 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
2047 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2049 ** Changes in behavior
2051 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
2052 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
2053 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
2054 'total' in the target column.
2056 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
2057 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
2058 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
2060 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
2061 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
2063 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
2064 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
2068 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
2069 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2071 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
2072 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
2074 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
2078 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
2079 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
2080 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
2081 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
2082 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
2083 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
2084 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
2085 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
2086 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
2087 for a patched distribution package.
2089 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
2090 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2092 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
2093 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
2094 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
2095 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2098 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
2102 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
2104 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
2105 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
2106 sha384sum and sha512sum.
2110 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
2111 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
2112 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
2113 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
2114 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
2116 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
2117 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
2119 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
2120 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
2121 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
2122 eventually exits nonzero.
2124 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
2125 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
2126 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
2127 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
2128 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
2130 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
2131 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
2132 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
2134 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
2135 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
2136 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
2138 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
2139 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
2140 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2142 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
2143 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
2144 Before, this would infloop:
2145 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
2146 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2148 ** Changes in behavior
2150 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
2154 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
2155 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
2156 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
2157 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
2158 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2161 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2162 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2163 format-changing options.
2165 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2166 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2167 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2168 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2169 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2173 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2174 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2175 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2176 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2177 are run without following the instructions in README.
2179 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2180 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2181 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2182 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2183 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2184 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2185 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2188 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2192 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2193 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2194 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2195 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2197 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2198 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2199 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2200 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2202 sort -u could read freed memory.
2203 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2204 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2205 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2209 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2210 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2211 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2212 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2215 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2219 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2220 processes will not intersperse their output.
2221 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2223 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2224 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2225 date: invalid date '\260'
2226 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2228 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2229 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2230 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2231 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2233 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2234 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2235 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2237 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2238 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2239 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2240 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2241 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2242 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2244 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2245 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2247 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2248 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2250 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2251 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2252 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2254 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2255 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2256 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2260 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2262 ** Changes in behavior
2264 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2265 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2266 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2267 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2268 have any reason to include it here.
2272 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2273 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2274 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2276 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2277 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2278 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2281 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2285 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2286 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2287 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2288 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2289 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2290 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2292 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2293 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2294 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2295 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2296 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2297 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2298 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2300 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2301 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2303 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2304 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2308 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2309 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2311 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2313 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2315 ** Changes in behavior
2317 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2318 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2319 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2321 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2322 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2325 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2329 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2330 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2331 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2332 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2333 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2334 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2335 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2336 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2338 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2339 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2340 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2341 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2342 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2344 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2345 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2347 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2348 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2350 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2351 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2353 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2354 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2356 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2357 additional static suffix to output file names.
2359 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2360 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2361 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2363 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2364 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2368 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2369 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2370 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2372 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2373 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2374 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2375 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2376 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2377 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2379 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2380 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2381 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2382 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2383 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2385 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2386 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2387 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2388 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2392 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2393 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2394 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2396 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2397 instead of causing a usage failure.
2399 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2402 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2406 realpath: print resolved file names.
2410 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2411 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2413 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2414 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2416 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2417 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2418 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2419 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2420 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2421 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2423 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2424 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2425 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2427 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2428 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2429 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2431 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2432 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2433 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2434 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2435 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2437 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2439 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2440 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2442 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2443 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2444 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2446 ** Changes in behavior
2448 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2449 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2450 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2451 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2452 usually-short referent instead.
2454 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2455 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2456 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2457 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2460 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2464 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2465 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2466 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2468 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2469 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2471 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2472 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2476 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2477 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2479 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2480 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2481 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2482 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2484 ** Changes in behavior
2486 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2487 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2488 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2492 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2493 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2494 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2497 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2501 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2502 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2503 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2505 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2506 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2508 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2509 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2510 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2511 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2512 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2514 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2515 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2516 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2517 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2518 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2519 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2520 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2521 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2523 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2524 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2526 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2527 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2529 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2530 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2532 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2533 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2534 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2536 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2537 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2538 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2539 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2541 ** Changes in behavior
2543 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2544 when -v or -c specified.
2546 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2547 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2551 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2552 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2553 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2554 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2555 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2557 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2558 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2559 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2561 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2562 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2563 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2564 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2565 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2566 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2567 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2569 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2570 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2571 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2575 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2576 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2578 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2581 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2582 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2584 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2585 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2587 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2588 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2590 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2592 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2596 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2597 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2599 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2602 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2606 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2607 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2609 ** Changes in behavior
2611 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2612 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2613 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2614 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2615 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2616 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2617 resolved for 2.6.39.
2618 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2619 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2620 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2624 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2627 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2631 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2632 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2633 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2635 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2636 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2637 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2639 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2640 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2641 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2643 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2644 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2646 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2647 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2649 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2650 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2652 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2653 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2657 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2658 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2659 processed portion thereof.
2661 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2662 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2664 ** Changes in behavior
2666 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2667 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2668 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2670 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2671 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2672 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2674 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2675 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2677 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2678 Use --preserve-context instead.
2680 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2683 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2687 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2688 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2689 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2690 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2691 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2693 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2694 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2696 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2697 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2698 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2700 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2701 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2703 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2704 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2708 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2709 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2710 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2711 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2712 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2713 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2714 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2715 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2717 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2718 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2719 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2721 ** Changes in behavior
2723 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2724 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2725 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2728 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2732 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2733 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2734 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2737 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2741 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2742 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2744 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2745 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2747 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2748 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2750 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2751 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2752 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2753 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2755 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2756 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2758 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2759 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2760 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2762 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2764 ** Changes in behavior
2766 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2767 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2768 to the number of available processors.
2772 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2773 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2774 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2777 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2781 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2782 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2783 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2784 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2786 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2787 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2788 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2790 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2791 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2793 ** Changes in behavior
2795 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2796 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2798 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2799 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2800 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2801 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2802 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2803 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2805 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2806 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2807 the same way as the others.
2809 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2810 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2813 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2817 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2818 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2819 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2821 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2822 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2824 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2825 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2826 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2828 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2829 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2831 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2832 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2834 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2835 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2836 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2838 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2839 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2840 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2841 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2845 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2846 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2848 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2851 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2852 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2854 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2856 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2857 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2858 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2860 ** Changes in behavior
2862 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2863 rather than its aliased target.
2865 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2866 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2867 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2869 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2870 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2871 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2872 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2873 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2874 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2875 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2876 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2878 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2880 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2882 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2883 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2886 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2887 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2888 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2889 control like taskset for example.
2891 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2893 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2894 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2895 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2896 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2897 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2898 includes %C when context information is available.
2900 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2901 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2902 rather than a file system attribute.
2904 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2905 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2906 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2907 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2909 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2910 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2911 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2913 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2914 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2915 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2918 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2922 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2923 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2925 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2927 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2928 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2930 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2931 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2932 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2933 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2935 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2936 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2937 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2941 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2942 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2944 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2945 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2946 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2948 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2949 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2950 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2951 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2952 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2953 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2954 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2955 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2956 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2958 ** Changes in behavior
2960 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2961 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2963 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2964 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2967 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2971 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2972 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2973 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2974 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2978 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2979 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2981 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2982 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2983 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2984 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2986 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2987 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2988 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2991 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2995 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2996 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2997 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2999 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
3000 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
3001 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
3003 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
3004 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3006 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
3007 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
3008 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
3009 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3011 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
3012 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
3013 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3015 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
3016 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
3017 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
3018 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3020 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
3021 renamed-aside and then recreated.
3022 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3024 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
3025 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
3026 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
3027 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3029 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
3030 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
3031 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3033 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
3034 processes will not intersperse their output.
3035 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
3038 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
3042 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
3043 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3045 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
3046 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3048 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
3049 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
3050 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
3051 the presence of the empty string argument.
3052 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3054 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
3055 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
3056 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
3057 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3059 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
3060 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3062 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
3063 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
3064 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3066 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
3067 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
3068 and with a malicious user on the same system
3069 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
3070 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
3073 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
3077 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
3078 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
3079 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3081 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
3082 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
3083 offending directory and all "contents."
3085 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
3086 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
3087 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
3089 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
3090 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
3091 without capabilities were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3093 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
3094 processes will not intersperse their output.
3095 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3096 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3098 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
3099 output the name of the file to stdout.
3100 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3102 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
3103 call fails with errno == EACCES.
3104 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3106 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
3107 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
3110 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
3111 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
3112 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
3114 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
3115 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
3116 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
3117 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
3118 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
3119 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3121 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
3122 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
3123 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
3124 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
3126 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
3127 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
3129 ** Changes in behavior
3131 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
3132 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
3133 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
3134 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
3135 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
3137 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
3138 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
3139 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
3140 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
3142 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
3144 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
3145 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
3146 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
3147 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
3148 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
3152 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
3156 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
3157 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
3159 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
3160 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3162 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3163 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3164 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3166 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3167 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3170 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3174 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3175 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3176 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3178 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3179 to accommodate leap seconds.
3180 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3182 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3183 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3184 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3186 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3188 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3189 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3190 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3192 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3193 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3194 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3195 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3196 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3200 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3201 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3202 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3203 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3205 ** Changes in behavior
3207 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3208 environment variable is set.
3210 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3211 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3212 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3216 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3217 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3218 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3219 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3221 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3222 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3223 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3224 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3228 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3229 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3230 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3232 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3233 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3234 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3235 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3236 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3237 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3238 another improvement:
3240 rm -r is now slightly more standard-conforming when operating on
3241 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3244 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3248 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3249 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3250 and libraries tested at configure time.
3251 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3253 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3254 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3256 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3257 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3259 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3260 printing a summary to stderr.
3261 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3263 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3264 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3265 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3267 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3268 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3270 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3271 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3272 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3273 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3275 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3276 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3277 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3278 which is relatively unusual.
3279 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3281 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3282 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3283 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3284 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3285 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3286 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3287 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3291 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3292 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3293 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3294 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3295 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3299 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3300 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3302 ** Changes in behavior
3304 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3305 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3306 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3307 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3308 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3311 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3315 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3316 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3318 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3319 before data copying has started.
3321 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3322 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3324 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3325 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3326 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3327 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3329 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3330 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3331 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3332 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3334 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3339 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3340 for its standard streams.
3342 ** Changes in behavior
3344 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3345 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3346 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3347 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3348 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3349 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3351 ** Deprecated options
3353 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3354 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3358 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3360 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3361 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3362 a btrfs file system.
3364 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3366 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3367 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3369 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3370 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3373 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3377 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3378 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3379 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3380 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3382 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3383 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3384 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3385 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3386 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3391 make check: two tests have been corrected
3395 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3396 inherited from gnulib.
3399 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3403 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3404 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3405 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3406 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3408 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3409 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3411 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3413 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3414 systems without xattr support.
3416 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3417 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3418 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3420 ** Changes in behavior
3422 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3423 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3424 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3425 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3427 ** Improved robustness
3429 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3430 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3431 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3432 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3433 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3434 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3435 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3436 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3437 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3441 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3442 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3444 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3445 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3446 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3447 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3448 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3451 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3455 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3456 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3457 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3461 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3462 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3463 data was read, or on process exit.
3464 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3466 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3467 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3468 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3469 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3471 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3472 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3473 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3474 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3476 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3477 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3479 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3480 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3482 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3483 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3484 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3486 ** Changes in behavior
3488 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3489 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3490 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3492 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3493 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3495 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3496 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3497 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3500 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3504 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3506 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3507 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3508 install: Never copies xattrs
3510 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3511 from overwriting any existing destination file
3513 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3514 mode where this feature is available.
3516 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3517 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3518 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3519 do not modify the destination at all.
3521 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3523 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3527 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3528 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3530 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3532 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3533 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3535 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3536 processing the first file name
3538 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3539 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3540 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3541 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3543 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3544 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3546 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3547 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3550 ** Changes in behavior
3552 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3553 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3555 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3556 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3557 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3559 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3560 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3562 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3564 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3565 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3566 is still marked with a '+'.
3569 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3573 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3574 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3578 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3579 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3580 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3581 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3582 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3583 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3585 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3586 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3588 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3589 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3591 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3593 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3594 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3595 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3597 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3598 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3600 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3601 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3602 used to factor large numbers.
3604 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3607 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3609 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3611 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3612 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3614 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3615 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3616 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3617 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3619 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3620 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3621 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3623 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3624 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3628 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3630 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3631 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3633 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3634 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3636 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3638 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3639 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3643 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3644 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3645 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3647 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3649 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3650 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3651 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3653 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3654 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3655 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3657 ** Changes in behavior
3659 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3660 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3663 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3667 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3668 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3669 'futimens' system calls.
3673 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3675 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3676 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3677 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3679 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3680 with no USERNAME argument.
3682 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3683 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3684 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3686 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3687 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3688 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3689 number of fields for some inputs.
3691 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3692 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3694 ** Changes in behavior
3696 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3697 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3700 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3704 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3706 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3707 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3708 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3709 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3711 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3712 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3714 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3715 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3717 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3718 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3720 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3721 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3722 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3723 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3725 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3726 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3727 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3728 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3729 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3730 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3732 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3733 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3735 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3736 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3737 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3739 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3740 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3742 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3743 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3745 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3746 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3747 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3748 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3750 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3751 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3753 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3754 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3756 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3757 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3758 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3762 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3763 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3765 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3766 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3767 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3768 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3772 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3773 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3775 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3777 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3781 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3782 which have negative errno values.
3786 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3790 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3794 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3795 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3798 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3802 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3803 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3804 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3806 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3807 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3808 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3809 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3813 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3814 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3815 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3816 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3819 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3823 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3825 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3826 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3827 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3830 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3834 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3835 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3837 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3839 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3841 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3843 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3847 ** Changes in behavior
3849 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3850 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3852 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3853 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3855 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3856 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3857 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3861 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3862 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3863 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3864 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3865 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3866 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3867 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3868 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3869 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3870 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3871 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3873 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3874 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3875 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3878 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3881 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3882 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3883 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3885 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3886 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3887 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3890 ** New build options
3892 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3893 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3894 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3895 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3897 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3898 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3899 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3900 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3901 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3902 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3903 of "make check" fail.
3905 ** Remove deprecated options
3907 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3908 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3909 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3910 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3911 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3913 ** Improved robustness
3915 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3916 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3917 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3918 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3919 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3920 loss of the contents of a/f.
3922 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3923 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3927 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3928 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3929 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3931 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3932 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3933 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3934 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3936 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3937 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3938 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3939 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3940 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3941 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3942 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3943 destination is a symlink.
3945 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3947 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3948 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3950 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3951 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3953 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3955 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3956 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3958 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3959 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3961 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3964 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3965 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3967 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3968 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3970 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3971 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3972 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3973 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3975 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3976 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3977 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3979 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3980 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3981 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3983 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3984 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3985 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3986 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3988 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3989 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3990 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3992 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3993 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3995 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3996 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3998 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
4000 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
4001 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
4002 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
4004 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
4005 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
4007 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
4008 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
4010 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
4011 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
4013 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
4014 [present in the original version]
4017 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
4021 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
4023 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
4024 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
4025 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
4027 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
4028 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
4030 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
4034 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
4035 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
4037 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
4038 support but with insufficient /proc support.
4040 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
4041 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
4043 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
4044 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
4045 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
4046 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
4047 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
4048 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
4050 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
4051 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
4054 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
4055 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
4057 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
4060 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
4061 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
4062 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
4064 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
4065 directory is unreadable.
4067 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
4068 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
4069 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
4071 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
4072 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
4073 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
4074 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
4075 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
4078 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
4079 Before it would print nothing.
4081 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
4083 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
4084 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
4085 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
4086 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
4087 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
4088 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
4089 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
4090 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
4092 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
4096 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
4097 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
4098 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
4100 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
4101 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
4102 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
4103 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
4106 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
4110 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
4111 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
4112 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
4113 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
4114 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
4115 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
4116 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4118 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
4119 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
4120 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
4121 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
4122 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
4123 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
4124 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
4125 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4127 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
4128 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
4129 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
4132 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
4136 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
4137 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
4139 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
4140 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
4141 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
4143 ** Improved robustness
4145 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
4146 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
4147 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
4150 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
4154 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
4155 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
4156 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
4157 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
4158 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4160 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4164 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4167 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4171 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4172 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4173 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4174 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4176 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4177 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4179 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4180 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4181 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4184 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4186 ** Improved robustness
4188 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4189 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4191 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4192 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4193 or NFS-mounted partition.
4195 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4196 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4200 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4201 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4202 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4203 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4204 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4205 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4207 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4208 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4210 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4211 or neglect to report file removal.
4213 For the "groups" command:
4215 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4216 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4218 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4220 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4222 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4226 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4227 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4230 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4232 ** Changes in behavior
4234 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4235 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4236 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4237 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4239 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4240 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4241 a final './' or '../' component.
4243 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4244 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4245 this only for pipes.
4247 ** Infrastructure changes
4249 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4250 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4251 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4252 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4256 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4257 name is "." or "..".
4259 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4260 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4261 dirent.d_type support.
4263 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4264 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4266 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4267 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4268 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4269 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4272 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4274 ** Changes in behavior
4276 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4280 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4281 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4285 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4286 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4287 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4289 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4290 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4292 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4293 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4295 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4297 ** Improved robustness
4299 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4300 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4301 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4303 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4304 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4307 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4308 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4310 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4311 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4313 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4314 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4316 ** Changes in behavior
4318 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4319 where the two are distinct.
4321 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4322 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4323 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4324 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4325 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4326 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4327 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4328 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4329 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4330 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4331 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4332 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4333 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4334 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4335 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4336 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4337 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4339 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4340 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4341 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4343 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4344 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4345 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4346 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4349 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4350 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4354 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4355 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4356 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4357 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4359 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4360 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4361 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4363 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4364 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4365 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4366 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4367 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4370 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4371 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4373 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4374 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4375 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4376 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4378 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4379 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4380 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4382 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4383 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4384 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4385 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4387 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4388 and sticky) with the -m option.
4390 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4391 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4392 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4393 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4394 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4396 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4397 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4399 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4403 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4404 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4405 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4406 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4408 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4410 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4412 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4413 silently ignoring one of them.
4415 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4416 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4417 containing this change was 5.92.
4419 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4420 automatically newline terminated.
4422 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4423 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4424 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4425 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4428 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4429 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4430 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4433 ** Scheduled for removal
4435 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4436 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4438 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4439 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4440 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4441 command to unlink a directory.
4443 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4444 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4445 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4446 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4450 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4451 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4452 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4453 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4454 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4455 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4459 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4460 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4462 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4464 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4465 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4466 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4468 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4469 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4472 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4473 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4475 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4476 list directories before files.
4478 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4479 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4480 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4481 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4484 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4486 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4488 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4489 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4490 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4492 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4493 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4497 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4498 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4499 usually printing nothing.
4501 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4503 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4504 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4505 them with hard-linked directories.
4507 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4508 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4509 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4511 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4512 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4513 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4515 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4518 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4519 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4521 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4522 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4524 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4525 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4527 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4528 all command-line arguments.
4530 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4532 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4534 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4535 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4537 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4539 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4540 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4541 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4542 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4543 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4545 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4546 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4548 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4549 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4550 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4551 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4553 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4555 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4559 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4560 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4562 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4563 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4565 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4566 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4568 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4569 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4571 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4572 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4574 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4576 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4577 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4578 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4581 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4583 ** Build-related bug fixes
4585 installing .mo files would fail
4588 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4592 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4594 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4597 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4601 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4602 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4606 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4608 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4609 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4611 ** Deprecated options
4613 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4614 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4616 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4620 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4622 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4623 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4624 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4625 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4627 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4630 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4636 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4641 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4643 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4645 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4646 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4647 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4649 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4650 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4651 problematic usages. These include:
4653 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4654 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4655 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4656 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4657 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4658 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4659 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4660 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4661 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4663 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4664 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4666 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4667 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4668 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4669 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4671 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4672 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4673 between binary and text files.
4675 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4679 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4683 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4684 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4686 head tac tail tee tr
4687 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4689 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4690 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4692 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4693 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4694 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4696 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4698 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4700 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4701 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4702 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4706 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4708 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4709 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4711 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4712 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4713 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4717 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4718 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4722 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4723 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4724 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4728 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4729 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4733 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4735 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4737 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4741 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4742 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4743 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4745 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4746 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4747 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4748 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4749 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4751 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4755 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4756 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4757 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4759 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4761 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4762 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4763 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4764 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4766 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4768 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4769 rather than silently wrapping around.
4771 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4772 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4774 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4775 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4777 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4778 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4779 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4780 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4782 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4784 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4786 ** Improved robustness
4788 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4789 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4790 no matter how large the result.
4792 ** Improved portability
4794 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4795 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4797 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4799 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4800 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4801 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4803 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4804 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4808 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4809 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4811 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4813 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4814 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4815 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4816 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4818 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4819 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4821 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4822 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4823 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4825 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4827 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4828 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4830 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4831 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4833 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4835 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4836 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4838 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4839 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4841 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4842 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4843 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4845 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4847 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4849 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4853 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4855 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4856 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4857 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4859 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4860 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4862 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4863 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4864 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4866 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4867 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4869 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4870 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4871 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4872 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4874 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4875 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4877 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4878 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4879 the file system does not support it.
4881 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4883 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4884 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4886 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4888 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4889 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4891 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4892 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4893 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4894 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4896 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4897 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4900 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4901 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4902 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4903 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4905 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4906 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4907 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4908 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4910 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4911 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4913 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4915 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4916 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4917 reporting incorrect results.
4921 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4922 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4924 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4927 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4929 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4930 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4932 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4933 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4935 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4938 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4939 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4940 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4941 the file name does not look like a page range.
4943 printf has several changes:
4945 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4946 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4948 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4949 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4950 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4952 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4953 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4956 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4957 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4959 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4960 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4962 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4964 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4965 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4967 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4969 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4971 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4972 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4973 when first encountering the directory.
4977 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4978 output; POSIX requires this.
4980 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4981 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4983 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4985 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4986 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4988 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4989 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4991 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4992 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4993 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4994 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4995 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4996 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4997 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4999 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
5000 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
5001 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
5003 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
5004 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
5006 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
5008 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
5010 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
5011 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
5012 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
5013 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
5015 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
5019 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
5020 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
5021 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
5022 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
5023 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
5025 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
5026 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
5027 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
5029 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
5030 is longer than PATH_MAX.
5032 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
5033 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
5035 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
5036 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
5037 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
5038 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
5039 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
5041 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
5042 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
5044 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
5045 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
5047 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
5049 nocreat do not create the output file
5050 excl fail if the output file already exists
5051 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
5052 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
5054 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
5056 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
5057 direct use direct I/O for data
5058 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
5059 sync likewise, but also for metadata
5060 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
5061 nofollow do not follow symlinks
5062 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
5064 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
5066 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
5067 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
5070 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
5071 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
5072 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
5073 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
5074 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
5075 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
5077 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
5078 list of NUL-terminated file names.
5080 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
5083 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
5085 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
5087 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
5088 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
5090 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
5091 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
5092 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
5094 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
5095 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
5096 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
5098 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
5100 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
5101 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
5103 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
5104 for compatibility with bash.
5106 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
5108 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
5109 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
5110 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
5111 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
5113 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
5114 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
5116 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
5117 ls supports TABSIZE.
5118 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
5119 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
5120 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
5122 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
5125 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
5127 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
5128 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
5129 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
5130 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
5131 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
5132 an offset, not as a file name.
5134 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
5135 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
5137 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
5138 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
5140 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
5141 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
5143 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
5144 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
5145 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
5147 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
5148 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
5150 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
5151 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
5155 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
5157 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
5159 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5163 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5164 or more arguments between partitions.
5166 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5167 holes in the destination.
5169 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5170 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5171 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5172 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5173 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5174 terminates immediately.
5176 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5178 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5180 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5181 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5182 not the empty string.
5184 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5185 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5189 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5190 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5191 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5194 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5201 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5205 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5206 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5208 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5209 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5211 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5212 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5213 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5216 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5220 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5221 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5223 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5224 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5226 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5227 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5228 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5230 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5232 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5235 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5237 ** Configuration option
5239 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5240 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5244 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5245 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5249 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5250 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5251 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5254 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5255 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5256 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5257 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5258 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5259 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5260 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5263 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5267 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5268 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5269 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5271 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5272 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5274 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5276 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5277 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5278 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5279 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5281 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5283 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5284 not just the ones that reference directories
5286 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5287 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5289 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5290 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5291 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5293 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5294 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5295 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5296 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5297 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5298 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5300 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5305 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5306 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5308 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5310 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5312 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5314 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5315 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5317 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5318 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5320 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5322 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5326 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5328 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5330 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5331 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5332 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5333 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5334 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5336 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5337 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5339 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5340 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5342 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5343 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5345 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5346 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5347 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5351 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5352 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5353 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5354 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5355 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5356 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5357 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5358 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5359 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5360 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5361 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5362 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5363 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5364 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5366 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5368 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5369 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5371 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5373 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5375 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5376 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5378 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5380 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5381 without a trailing newline.
5383 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5384 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5386 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5389 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5393 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5395 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5397 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5398 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5399 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5400 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5402 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5404 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5405 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5406 be printed without leading spaces.
5408 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5409 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5414 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5415 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5416 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5418 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5420 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5421 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5423 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5424 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5426 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5427 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5429 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5431 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5433 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5435 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5436 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5438 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5440 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5442 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5443 byte offsets are specified.
5446 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5449 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5452 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5453 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5454 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5455 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5456 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5457 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5458 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5459 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5460 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5461 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5462 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5463 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5464 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5465 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5466 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5467 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5468 directory where M has write access.
5469 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5470 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5471 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5474 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5475 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5476 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5477 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5478 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5479 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5480 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5481 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5482 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5483 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5484 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5485 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5486 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5487 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5488 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5489 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5490 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5491 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5492 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5493 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5494 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5495 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5496 appeared one additional time.
5498 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5499 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5500 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5501 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5504 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5505 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5506 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5507 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5508 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5509 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5510 if there were more than 338.
5512 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5513 - false --help now exits nonzero
5516 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5517 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5518 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5519 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5522 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5523 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5524 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5525 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5526 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5529 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5530 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5531 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5532 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5533 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5534 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5535 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5538 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5539 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5540 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5541 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5542 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5543 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5545 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5546 under certain unusual conditions
5547 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5548 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5551 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5552 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5553 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5554 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5555 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5556 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5557 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5558 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5559 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5560 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5561 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5562 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5563 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5564 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5565 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5566 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5569 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5570 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5573 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5574 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5575 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5576 involving hard-linked directories
5577 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5578 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5579 character-special and block files
5582 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5583 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5584 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5585 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5586 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5587 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5588 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5589 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5590 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5592 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5593 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5594 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5595 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5596 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5597 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5598 specified on the command line.
5599 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5600 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5601 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5602 the first file untouched.
5603 * readlink: new program
5604 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5605 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5606 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5607 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5608 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5609 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5612 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5613 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5614 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5615 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5616 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5617 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5618 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5619 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5620 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5621 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5622 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5623 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5625 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5626 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5627 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5629 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5630 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5631 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5632 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5633 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5634 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5635 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5636 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5639 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5640 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5643 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5644 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5645 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5646 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5647 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5648 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5649 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5652 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5653 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5655 ========================================================================
5656 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5657 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5660 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5662 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5663 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5664 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5665 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5666 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5667 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5668 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5669 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5670 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5671 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5672 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5673 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5675 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5676 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5677 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5678 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5680 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5683 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5685 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5686 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5687 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5688 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5689 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5690 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5691 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5694 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5695 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5696 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5697 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5698 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5699 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5700 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5701 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5702 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5703 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5704 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5705 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5706 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5707 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5708 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5709 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5711 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5712 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5714 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5715 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5716 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5717 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5718 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5719 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5721 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5722 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5723 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5724 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5725 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5726 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5727 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5729 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5730 the source files in the following example:
5731 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5732 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5733 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5734 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5735 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5736 links between source files with --preserve=links
5737 * cp accepts new options:
5738 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5739 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5740 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5741 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5742 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5743 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5744 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5745 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5746 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5748 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5749 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5750 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5751 even though it's older than dest.
5752 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5753 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5754 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5755 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5756 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5758 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5759 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5760 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5761 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5762 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5763 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5764 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5766 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5767 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5768 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5770 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5771 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5772 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5773 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5774 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5775 This is the default.
5777 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5778 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5779 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5780 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5781 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5783 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5786 ========================================================================
5787 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5788 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5791 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5792 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5794 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5795 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5796 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5797 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5798 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5800 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5801 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5802 that specifies a non-directory
5805 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5806 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5807 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5808 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5809 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5810 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5811 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5812 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5813 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5814 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5815 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5816 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5817 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5818 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5819 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5820 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5821 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5822 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5823 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5824 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5825 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5826 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5827 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5828 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5830 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5831 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5832 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5834 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5836 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5837 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5839 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5840 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5841 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5842 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5843 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5845 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5846 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5847 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5848 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5849 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5851 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5853 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5854 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5855 * still more portability fixes
5856 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5857 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5859 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5861 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5863 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5865 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5866 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5867 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5868 there is any time remaining
5869 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5871 ========================================================================
5872 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5873 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5875 This package began as the union of the following:
5876 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5878 ========================================================================
5880 Copyright (C) 2001-2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5882 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5883 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5884 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5885 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5886 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5887 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.