1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp fixes support for --update=none-fail, which would have been
8 rejected as an invalid option.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.5]
11 ls and printf fix shell quoted output in the edge case of escaped
12 first and last characters, and single quotes in the string.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
15 mv works again with macFUSE file systems. Previously it would
16 have exited with a "Function not implemented" error.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
19 'shuf' generates more-random output when the output is small.
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
22 'tail -c 4096 /dev/zero' no longer loops forever.
23 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
25 ** Changes in behavior
27 ls's -f option now simply acts like -aU, instead of also ignoring
28 some earlier options. For example 'ls -fl' and 'ls -lf' are now
29 equivalent because -f no longer ignores an earlier -l. The new
30 behavior is more orthogonal and is compatible with FreeBSD.
32 stat -f -c%T now reports the "fuseblk" file system type as "fuse",
33 given that there is no longer a distinct "ctl" fuse variant file system.
37 ls now supports the --sort=name option,
38 to explicitly select the default operation of sorting by file name.
42 'head -c NUM', 'head -n NUM', 'nl -l NUM', 'nproc --ignore NUM',
43 'tail -c NUM', 'tail -n NUM', and 'tail --max-unchanged-stats NUM’
44 no longer fail merely because NUM stands for 2**64 or more.
46 sort operates more efficiently when used on pseudo files with
47 an apparent size of 0, like those in /proc.
49 stat and tail now know about the "bcachefs", and "pidfs" file system types.
50 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type,
51 and tail -f uses inotify for these file systems.
53 wc now reads a minimum of 256KiB at a time.
54 This was previously 16KiB and increasing to 256KiB was seen to increase
55 wc -l performance by about 10% when reading cached files on modern systems.
58 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.5 (2024-03-28) [stable]
62 chmod -R now avoids a race where an attacker may replace a traversed file
63 with a symlink, causing chmod to operate on an unintended file.
64 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
66 cp, mv, and install no longer issue spurious diagnostics like "failed
67 to preserve ownership" when copying to GNU/Linux CIFS file systems.
68 They do this by working around some Linux CIFS bugs.
70 cp --no-preserve=mode will correctly maintain set-group-ID bits
71 for created directories. Previously on systems that didn't support ACLs,
72 cp would have reset the set-group-ID bit on created directories.
73 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
75 join and uniq now support multi-byte characters better.
76 For example, 'join -tX' now works even if X is a multi-byte character,
77 and both programs now treat multi-byte characters like U+3000
78 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE as blanks if the current locale treats them so.
80 numfmt options like --suffix no longer have an arbitrary 127-byte limit.
81 [bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]
83 mktemp with --suffix now better diagnoses templates with too few X's.
84 Previously it conflated the insignificant --suffix in the error.
85 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
87 sort again handles thousands grouping characters in single-byte locales
88 where the grouping character is greater than CHAR_MAX. For e.g. signed
89 character platforms with a 0xA0 (aka  ) grouping character.
90 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
92 split --line-bytes with a mixture of very long and short lines
93 no longer overwrites the heap (CVE-2024-0684).
94 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
96 tail no longer mishandles input from files in /proc and /sys file systems,
97 on systems with a page size larger than the stdio BUFSIZ.
98 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
100 timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might kill arbitrary
101 processes after a failed process fork.
102 [bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]
104 timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might fail to
105 kill monitored processes immediately after forking them.
106 [bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]
108 wc no longer fails to count unprintable characters as parts of words.
109 [bug introduced in textutils-2.1]
111 ** Changes in behavior
113 base32 and base64 no longer require padding when decoding.
114 Previously an error was given for non padded encoded data.
116 base32 and base64 have improved detection of corrupted encodings.
117 Previously encodings with non zero padding bits were accepted.
119 basenc --base16 -d now supports lower case hexadecimal characters.
120 Previously an error was given for lower case hex digits.
122 cp --no-clobber, and mv -n no longer exit with failure status if
123 existing files are encountered in the destination. Instead they revert
124 to the behavior from before v9.2, silently skipping existing files.
126 ls --dired now implies long format output without hyperlinks enabled,
127 and will take precedence over previously specified formats or hyperlink mode.
129 numfmt will accept lowercase 'k' to indicate Kilo or Kibi units on input,
130 and uses lowercase 'k' when outputting such units in '--to=si' mode.
132 pinky no longer tries to canonicalize the user's login location by default,
133 rather requiring the new --lookup option to enable this often slow feature.
135 wc no longer ignores encoding errors when counting words.
136 Instead, it treats them as non white space.
140 chgrp now accepts the --from=OWNER:GROUP option to restrict changes to files
141 with matching current OWNER and/or GROUP, as already supported by chown(1).
143 chmod adds support for -h, -H,-L,-P, and --dereference options, providing
144 more control over symlink handling. This supports more secure handling of
145 CLI arguments, and is more consistent with chown, and chmod on other systems.
147 cp now accepts the --keep-directory-symlink option (like tar), to preserve
148 and follow existing symlinks to directories in the destination.
150 cp and mv now accept the --update=none-fail option, which is similar
151 to the --no-clobber option, except that existing files are diagnosed,
152 and the command exits with failure status if existing files.
153 The -n,--no-clobber option is best avoided due to platform differences.
155 env now accepts the -a,--argv0 option to override the zeroth argument
156 of the command being executed.
158 mv now accepts an --exchange option, which causes the source and
159 destination to be exchanged. It should be combined with
160 --no-target-directory (-T) if the destination is a directory.
161 The exchange is atomic if source and destination are on a single
162 file system that supports atomic exchange; --exchange is not yet
163 supported in other situations.
165 od now supports printing IEEE half precision floating point with -t fH,
166 or brain 16 bit floating point with -t fB, where supported by the compiler.
168 tail now supports following multiple processes, with repeated --pid options.
172 cp,mv,install,cat,split now read and write a minimum of 256KiB at a time.
173 This was previously 128KiB and increasing to 256KiB was seen to increase
174 throughput by 10-20% when reading cached files on modern systems.
176 env,kill,timeout now support unnamed signals. kill(1) for example now
177 supports sending such signals, and env(1) will list them appropriately.
179 SELinux operations in file copy operations are now more efficient,
180 avoiding unneeded MCS/MLS label translation.
182 sort no longer dynamically links to libcrypto unless -R is used.
183 This decreases startup overhead in the typical case.
185 wc is now much faster in single-byte locales and somewhat faster in
189 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.4 (2023-08-29) [stable]
193 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
194 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
195 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
197 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
198 presented with malformed checksum lines.
199 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
201 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
202 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
203 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
205 'cp --sparse=never' will avoid copy-on-write (reflinking) and copy offloading,
206 to ensure no holes present in the destination copy.
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
209 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
210 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
212 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
213 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
214 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
215 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
217 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
218 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
219 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
221 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
222 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
224 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
225 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
226 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
228 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
229 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
230 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
232 pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
233 platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
234 Also see the new --enable-systemd option mentioned below.
235 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
237 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
238 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
240 shred again operates on Solaris when built for 64 bits.
241 Previously it would have exited with a "getrandom: Invalid argument" error.
242 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
244 tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
245 erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
246 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
248 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD,
249 and is being built again on FreeBSD and Haiku.
250 [bugs introduced in coreutils-9.2]
252 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
253 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
254 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
256 ** Changes in behavior
258 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
259 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
260 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
262 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
263 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
264 checksum utilities with cksum.
266 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
267 Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
268 where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
269 Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
270 Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
271 [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
275 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
276 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
277 reinstating that behavior from coreutils-9.0.
279 comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
280 write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
282 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
283 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
285 split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
287 tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
289 'who -a' now displays the boot time on Alpine Linux, OpenBSD,
290 Cygwin, Haiku, and some Android distributions
292 'uptime' now succeeds on some Android distributions, and now counts
293 VM saved/sleep time on GNU (Linux, Hurd, kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD,
296 On GNU/Linux platforms where utmp-format files have 32-bit timestamps,
297 pinky, uptime, and who can now work for times after the year 2038,
298 so long as systemd is installed, you configure with a new, experimental
299 option --enable-systemd, and you use the programs without file arguments.
300 (For example, with systemd 'who /var/log/wtmp' does not work because
301 systemd does not support the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp.)
304 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
308 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
309 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
310 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
311 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
312 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
314 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
315 Previously it may have issued "File exists" errors when
316 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
317 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
319 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
320 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
321 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
323 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
324 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
325 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
326 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
328 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
329 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
331 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
332 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
333 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
335 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
336 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
337 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
338 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
340 ** Changes in behavior
342 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
343 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
344 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
345 due to -n, -i, or -u.
349 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
350 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
351 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
354 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
358 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
359 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
360 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
361 total line in this case.
362 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
364 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
365 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
366 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
368 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
369 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
371 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
372 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
373 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
374 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
376 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
377 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
378 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
379 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
380 which may have resulted in data corruption.
381 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
383 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
384 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
385 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
387 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
388 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
390 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
391 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
392 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
394 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
395 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
396 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
398 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
399 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
400 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
402 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
403 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
404 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
405 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
406 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
408 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
409 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
410 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
411 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
412 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
414 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
415 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
416 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
418 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
419 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
420 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
422 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
423 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
424 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
425 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
427 ** Changes in behavior
429 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
430 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
431 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
432 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
433 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
434 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
436 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
437 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
439 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
440 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
441 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
442 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
444 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
445 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
446 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
448 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
449 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
450 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
451 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
453 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
454 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
455 This behavior is now documented.
457 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
458 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
460 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
461 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
462 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
464 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
465 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
466 from errors from the invoked command.
468 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
469 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
470 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
473 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
477 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
478 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
480 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
481 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
483 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
484 print details on how a file is being copied.
486 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
487 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
489 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
490 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
492 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
493 asked to move a file to a different file system.
495 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
496 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
498 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
499 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
501 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
502 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
506 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
507 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
508 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
509 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
510 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
512 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
513 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
515 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
516 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
518 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
519 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
520 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
522 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
523 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
524 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
526 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
527 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
529 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
530 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
531 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
532 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
535 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
539 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
540 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
541 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
543 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
544 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
545 before adjusting it to the correct value.
546 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
548 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
549 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
550 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
552 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
553 and B is in some other file system.
554 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
556 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
557 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
558 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
560 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
561 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
563 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
564 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
565 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
566 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
567 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
569 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
570 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
571 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
573 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
574 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
575 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
577 ** Changes in behavior
579 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
580 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
581 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
583 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
584 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
585 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
586 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
588 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
589 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
591 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
592 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
593 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
595 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
596 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
598 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
599 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
600 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
601 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
602 though they still work.
604 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
605 capabilities are rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
606 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
608 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
609 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
611 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
612 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
613 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
615 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
616 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
617 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
618 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
622 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
623 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
625 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
626 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
628 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
629 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
633 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
634 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
636 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
637 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
638 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
641 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
643 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
644 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
645 since synchronizing can take a long time.
647 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
649 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
650 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
652 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
654 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
655 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
656 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
660 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
661 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
664 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
668 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
669 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
671 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
672 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
673 is a non regular file.
674 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
676 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
677 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
678 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
680 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
681 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
683 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
684 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
686 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
687 heavily changed during the run.
688 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
690 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
691 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
693 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
694 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
696 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstattable files.
697 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
699 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
700 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
702 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
703 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
704 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
706 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
707 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
709 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
710 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
712 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
713 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
714 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
716 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
717 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
720 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
721 invalid combinations of case character classes.
722 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
724 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
725 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
726 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
728 ** Changes in behavior
730 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
731 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
733 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
734 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
735 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
737 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
738 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
739 that was made in release 8.32.
741 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
742 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
743 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
745 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
746 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
748 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
749 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
753 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
754 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
755 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
756 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
758 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
760 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
761 when verifying tagged format checksums.
763 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
765 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
766 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
768 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
769 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
771 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
772 NUL instead of newline.
774 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
776 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
777 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
778 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
782 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
783 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
785 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
786 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
787 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
789 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
790 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
792 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
793 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
795 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
796 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
798 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
799 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
800 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
802 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
804 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
805 where avx2 instructions are supported.
806 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
809 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
813 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
814 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
815 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
817 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
818 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
819 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
820 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
821 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
823 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
824 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
825 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
826 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
827 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
828 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
830 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
831 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
833 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
834 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
835 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
836 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
838 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
839 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
840 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
841 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
843 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
844 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
846 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
847 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
848 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
849 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
851 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
852 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
853 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
855 ** Changes in behavior
857 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
858 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
859 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
860 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
861 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
864 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
865 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
866 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
867 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
868 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
869 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
870 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
871 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
874 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
875 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
876 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
877 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
879 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
880 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
881 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
883 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
884 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
888 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
889 file creation time, where available.
891 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
892 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
894 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
895 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
896 useful on network file systems.
900 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
901 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
903 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
904 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
905 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
909 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
912 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
916 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
917 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
919 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
920 after asking the user whether to proceed.
921 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
923 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
924 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
926 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
927 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
928 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
930 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
931 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
932 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
933 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
934 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
935 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
937 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
938 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
940 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
941 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
943 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
944 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
945 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
947 ** Changes in behavior
949 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
950 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
951 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
952 end-of-options marker.
954 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
957 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
958 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
960 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
961 environment variable is set.
963 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
964 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
965 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
966 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
967 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
969 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
971 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
972 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
973 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
974 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
976 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
977 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
981 id now supports specifying multiple users.
983 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
984 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
986 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
987 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
988 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
989 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
990 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
991 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
993 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
994 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
996 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
997 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
999 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
1000 signal handling before executing a program.
1004 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
1005 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
1006 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
1010 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
1011 which is common in Asian locales.
1013 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
1014 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1016 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
1017 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
1020 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
1024 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
1025 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
1026 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
1027 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
1028 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
1029 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
1031 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
1032 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
1033 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
1034 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
1036 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
1037 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
1038 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
1039 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
1040 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
1041 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
1043 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
1044 even if it can't be traversed.
1045 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
1047 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
1048 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
1049 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
1051 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
1052 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1054 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
1055 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
1056 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
1057 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
1058 now silently does nothing if A exists.
1059 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
1061 ** Changes in behavior
1063 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
1064 it is self referential.
1066 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
1070 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
1072 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
1073 each processing step.
1075 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
1076 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
1079 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
1080 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
1081 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
1083 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
1084 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
1088 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
1089 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
1091 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
1092 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
1093 and tail -f uses inotify.
1095 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
1096 which is especially significant on macOS.
1099 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
1103 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
1104 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
1106 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
1107 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
1108 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
1109 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
1111 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
1112 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1114 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
1115 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1117 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
1118 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
1119 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
1121 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
1122 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1124 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
1125 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
1126 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1128 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
1129 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
1130 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
1131 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
1132 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1136 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
1140 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
1142 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
1143 rather than reading from the start.
1145 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
1146 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
1147 for unknown long options.
1151 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
1152 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
1155 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
1159 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
1160 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
1161 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
1162 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1164 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
1165 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
1166 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
1167 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
1168 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1170 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
1171 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
1172 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
1173 now fails instead of losing the data.
1174 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1176 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
1177 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
1178 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1180 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
1181 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
1182 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1184 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
1185 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
1186 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1188 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
1189 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
1190 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1192 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
1193 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
1194 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1196 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
1197 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
1198 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
1200 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
1201 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
1202 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1204 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
1205 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
1206 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1208 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
1209 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1211 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
1212 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
1213 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1215 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
1216 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1218 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
1219 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
1220 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
1221 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1223 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
1224 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
1225 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1227 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
1228 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
1229 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1231 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
1232 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1236 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1237 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1238 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1240 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1241 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1243 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1244 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1246 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1247 executing the subsidiary program.
1249 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1251 ** Changes in behavior
1253 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1254 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1255 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1256 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1260 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1262 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1263 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1265 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1266 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1267 is effective in this case.
1270 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1274 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1275 as appropriate for the -a, --preserve=context, or -Z options.
1276 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1278 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1279 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1280 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1282 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1283 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1284 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1286 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1287 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1288 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1290 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1291 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1292 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1294 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1295 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1296 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1297 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1298 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1300 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1301 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1302 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1303 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1307 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1308 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1309 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1310 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1312 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1313 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1314 time zone is indeterminate.
1316 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1317 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1318 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1319 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1321 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1322 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1323 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1325 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1326 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1328 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1329 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1330 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1334 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1335 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1336 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1339 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1343 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1344 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1347 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1348 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1349 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1351 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1352 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1353 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1354 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1355 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1357 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1358 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1359 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1361 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1362 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1364 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1365 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1366 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1368 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1369 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1370 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1372 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1373 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1375 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1376 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1377 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1379 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1380 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1382 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1383 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1384 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1386 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1388 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1389 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1391 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1392 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1394 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1395 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1397 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1398 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1400 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1401 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1402 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1403 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1405 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1406 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1407 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1409 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1410 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1411 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1413 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1414 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1415 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1417 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1418 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1419 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1421 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1422 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1424 ** Changes in behavior
1426 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1428 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1429 values for any argument.
1431 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1432 they are out of localtime range.
1434 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1435 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1436 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1437 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1441 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1442 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1443 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1445 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1446 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1448 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1449 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1451 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1453 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1454 written to a terminal.
1456 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1457 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1459 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1460 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1461 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1462 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1463 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1464 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1465 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1466 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1467 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1468 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1469 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1471 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1472 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1476 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1477 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1481 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1483 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1484 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1486 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1489 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1493 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1494 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1495 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1496 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1498 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1499 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1501 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1502 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1503 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1505 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1506 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1508 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1509 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1510 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1512 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1513 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1515 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1516 that specify an offset for the first field.
1517 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1519 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1520 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1524 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1525 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1529 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1530 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1532 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1533 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1534 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1535 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1536 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1538 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1539 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1540 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1542 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1543 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1544 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1546 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1547 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1549 ** Changes in behavior
1551 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1552 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1554 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1555 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1557 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1558 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1560 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1561 when outputting to a terminal.
1563 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1567 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1568 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1570 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1571 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1573 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1574 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1575 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1577 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1578 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1580 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1581 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1582 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1584 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1586 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1587 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1588 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1590 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1591 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1594 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1598 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1599 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1601 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1602 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1604 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1605 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1606 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1608 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1609 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1610 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1611 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1613 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1614 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1615 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1616 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1618 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1619 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1621 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1622 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1624 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1625 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1626 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1628 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1629 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1630 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1632 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1633 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1634 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1636 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1637 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1638 character at the 4GiB position.
1639 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1641 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1642 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1644 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1645 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1647 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1648 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1649 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1651 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1652 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1654 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1655 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1656 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1658 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1659 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1661 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1662 when those files are being created or renamed.
1663 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1667 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1668 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1669 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1670 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1672 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1673 on stderr approximately every second.
1675 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1676 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1678 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1679 other than the default newline character.
1681 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1682 a useful setting with high latency links.
1684 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1685 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1687 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1688 and output errors in general.
1690 ** Changes in behavior
1692 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1693 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1694 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1695 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1697 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1698 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1699 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1700 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1701 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1703 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1704 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1706 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1708 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1709 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1711 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1712 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1716 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1717 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1719 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1720 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1722 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1723 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1725 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1726 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1728 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1730 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1731 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1732 documentation are provided.
1735 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1739 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1740 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1742 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1743 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1744 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1745 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1747 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1748 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1749 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1750 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1752 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1753 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1755 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1756 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1758 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1759 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1760 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1761 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1762 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1763 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1764 values are in octal.
1777 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1779 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1780 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1781 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1782 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1783 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1784 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1786 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1787 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1788 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1789 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1791 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1792 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1793 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1795 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1796 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1797 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1798 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1800 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1801 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1802 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1804 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1805 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1806 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1808 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1809 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1810 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1811 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1812 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1814 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1815 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1816 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1818 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1819 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1821 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1822 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1823 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1825 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1826 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1828 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1829 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1831 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1832 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1834 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1835 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1837 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1838 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1839 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1841 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1842 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1846 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1847 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1849 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1850 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1851 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1852 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1853 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1854 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1855 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1856 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1857 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1858 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1859 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1860 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1861 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1862 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1863 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1864 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1865 it suitable for embedded system.
1867 ** Changes in behavior
1869 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1870 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1872 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1873 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1875 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1876 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1877 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1879 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1880 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1881 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1885 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1886 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1887 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1889 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1891 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1892 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1893 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1895 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1896 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1897 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1898 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1900 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1901 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1903 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1904 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1905 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1908 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1912 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstattable
1913 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1914 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1916 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1917 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1918 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1919 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1921 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1922 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1923 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1925 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1926 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1928 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1930 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1931 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1932 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1934 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1935 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1936 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1938 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1939 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1940 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1941 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1943 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1944 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1945 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1947 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1948 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1949 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1951 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1952 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1954 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1955 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1956 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1957 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1959 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1960 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1961 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1963 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1964 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1965 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1969 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1970 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1971 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1973 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1974 used to identify the split points.
1976 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1977 command line argument through to the output.
1979 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1982 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1983 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1985 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1986 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1988 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1990 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1991 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1992 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1994 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1995 unique groups with empty lines.
1997 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1998 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
2000 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
2003 ** Changes in behavior
2005 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
2006 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
2007 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
2008 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
2010 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
2011 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
2013 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
2014 not just the transfer counts.
2016 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
2018 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
2019 as per the documented interface.
2023 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
2025 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
2026 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
2027 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
2028 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2030 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
2031 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
2032 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
2033 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
2035 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
2036 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
2037 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
2039 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
2040 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
2042 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
2043 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
2045 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
2049 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2052 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
2056 numfmt: reformat numbers
2060 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
2061 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
2062 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
2064 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
2065 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
2066 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
2068 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
2069 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
2073 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
2074 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2076 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
2077 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
2078 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2080 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
2081 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
2082 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2084 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
2085 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
2086 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2088 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
2089 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
2090 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
2092 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
2093 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
2094 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
2096 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
2097 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2099 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
2100 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
2102 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
2103 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
2104 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
2106 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
2107 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
2108 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2110 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
2111 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
2112 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2114 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
2115 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
2116 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
2117 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2119 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
2120 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
2121 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2123 ** Changes in behavior
2125 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
2126 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
2127 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
2128 'total' in the target column.
2130 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
2131 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
2132 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
2134 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
2135 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
2137 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
2138 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
2142 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
2143 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2145 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
2146 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
2148 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
2152 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
2153 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
2154 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
2155 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
2156 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
2157 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
2158 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
2159 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
2160 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
2161 for a patched distribution package.
2163 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
2164 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2166 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
2167 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
2168 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
2169 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2172 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
2176 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
2178 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
2179 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
2180 sha384sum and sha512sum.
2184 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
2185 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
2186 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
2187 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
2188 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
2190 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
2191 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
2193 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
2194 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
2195 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
2196 eventually exits nonzero.
2198 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
2199 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
2200 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
2201 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
2202 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
2204 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
2205 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
2206 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
2208 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
2209 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
2210 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
2212 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
2213 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
2214 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2216 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
2217 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
2218 Before, this would infloop:
2219 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
2220 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2222 ** Changes in behavior
2224 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
2228 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
2229 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
2230 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
2231 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
2232 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2235 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2236 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2237 format-changing options.
2239 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2240 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2241 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2242 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2243 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2247 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2248 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2249 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2250 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2251 are run without following the instructions in README.
2253 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2254 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2255 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2256 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2257 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2258 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2259 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2262 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2266 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2267 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2268 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2269 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2271 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2272 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2273 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2274 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2276 sort -u could read freed memory.
2277 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2278 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2279 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2283 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2284 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2285 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2286 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2289 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2293 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2294 processes will not intersperse their output.
2295 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2297 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2298 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2299 date: invalid date '\260'
2300 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2302 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2303 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2304 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2305 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2307 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2308 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2309 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2311 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2312 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2313 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2314 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2315 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2316 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2318 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2319 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2321 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2322 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2324 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2325 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2326 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2328 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2329 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2330 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2334 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2336 ** Changes in behavior
2338 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2339 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2340 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2341 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2342 have any reason to include it here.
2346 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2347 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2348 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2350 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2351 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2352 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2355 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2359 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2360 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2361 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2362 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2363 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2364 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2366 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2367 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2368 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2369 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2370 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2371 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2372 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2374 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2375 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2377 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2378 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2382 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2383 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2385 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2387 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2389 ** Changes in behavior
2391 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2392 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2393 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2395 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2396 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2399 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2403 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2404 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2405 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2406 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2407 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2408 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2409 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2410 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2412 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2413 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2414 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2415 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2416 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2418 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2419 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2421 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2422 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2424 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2425 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2427 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2428 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2430 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2431 additional static suffix to output file names.
2433 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2434 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2435 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2437 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2438 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2442 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2443 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2444 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2446 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2447 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2448 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2449 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2450 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2451 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2453 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2454 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2455 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2456 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2457 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2459 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2460 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2461 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2462 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2466 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2467 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2468 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2470 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2471 instead of causing a usage failure.
2473 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2476 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2480 realpath: print resolved file names.
2484 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2485 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2487 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2488 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2490 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2491 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2492 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2493 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2494 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2495 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2497 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2498 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2499 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2501 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2502 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2503 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2505 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2506 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2507 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2508 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2509 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2511 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2513 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2514 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2516 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2517 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2518 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2520 ** Changes in behavior
2522 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2523 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2524 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2525 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2526 usually-short referent instead.
2528 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2529 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2530 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2531 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2534 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2538 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2539 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2540 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2542 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2543 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2545 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2546 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2550 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2551 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2553 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2554 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2555 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2556 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2558 ** Changes in behavior
2560 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2561 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2562 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2566 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2567 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2568 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2571 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2575 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2576 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2577 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2579 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2580 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2582 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2583 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2584 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2585 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2586 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2588 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2589 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2590 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2591 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2592 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2593 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2594 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2595 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2597 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2598 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2600 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2601 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2603 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2604 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2606 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2607 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2608 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2610 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2611 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2612 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2613 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2615 ** Changes in behavior
2617 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2618 when -v or -c specified.
2620 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2621 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2625 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2626 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2627 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2628 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2629 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2631 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2632 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2633 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2635 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2636 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2637 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2638 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2639 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2640 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2641 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2643 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2644 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2645 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2649 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2650 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2652 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2655 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2656 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2658 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2659 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2661 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2662 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2664 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2666 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2670 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2671 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2673 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2676 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2680 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2681 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2683 ** Changes in behavior
2685 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2686 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2687 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2688 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2689 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2690 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2691 resolved for 2.6.39.
2692 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2693 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2694 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2698 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2701 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2705 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2706 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2707 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2709 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2710 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2711 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2713 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2714 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2715 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2717 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2718 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2720 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2721 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2723 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2724 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2726 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2727 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2731 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2732 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2733 processed portion thereof.
2735 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2736 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2738 ** Changes in behavior
2740 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2741 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2742 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2744 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2745 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2746 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2748 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2749 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2751 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2752 Use --preserve-context instead.
2754 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2757 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2761 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2762 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2763 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2764 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2765 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2767 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2768 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2770 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2771 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2772 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2774 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2775 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2777 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2778 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2782 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2783 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2784 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2785 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2786 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2787 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2788 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2789 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2791 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2792 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2793 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2795 ** Changes in behavior
2797 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2798 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2799 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2802 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2806 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2807 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2808 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2811 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2815 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2816 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2818 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2819 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2821 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2822 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2824 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2825 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2826 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2827 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2829 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2830 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2832 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2833 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2834 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2836 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2838 ** Changes in behavior
2840 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2841 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2842 to the number of available processors.
2846 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2847 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2848 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2851 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2855 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2856 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2857 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2858 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2860 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2861 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2862 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2864 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2865 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2867 ** Changes in behavior
2869 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2870 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2872 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2873 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2874 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2875 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2876 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2877 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2879 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2880 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2881 the same way as the others.
2883 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2884 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2887 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2891 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2892 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2893 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2895 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2896 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2898 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2899 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2900 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2902 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2903 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2905 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2906 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2908 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2909 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2910 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2912 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2913 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2914 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2915 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2919 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2920 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2922 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2925 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2926 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2928 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2930 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2931 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2932 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2934 ** Changes in behavior
2936 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2937 rather than its aliased target.
2939 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2940 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2941 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2943 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2944 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2945 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2946 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2947 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2948 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2949 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2950 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2952 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2954 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2956 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2957 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2960 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2961 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2962 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2963 control like taskset for example.
2965 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2967 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2968 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2969 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2970 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2971 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2972 includes %C when context information is available.
2974 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2975 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2976 rather than a file system attribute.
2978 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2979 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2980 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2981 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2983 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2984 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2985 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2987 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2988 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2989 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2992 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2996 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2997 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2999 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
3001 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
3002 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3004 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
3005 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
3006 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
3007 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
3009 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
3010 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
3011 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3015 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
3016 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
3018 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
3019 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
3020 duration after the initial signal was sent.
3022 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
3023 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
3024 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
3025 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
3026 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
3027 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
3028 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
3029 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
3030 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
3032 ** Changes in behavior
3034 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
3035 sequence when it would be a no-op.
3037 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
3038 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
3041 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
3045 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
3046 of available processors, which may not have been the case
3047 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
3048 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3052 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
3053 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
3055 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
3056 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
3057 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
3058 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
3060 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
3061 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
3062 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
3065 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
3069 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
3070 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
3071 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
3073 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
3074 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
3075 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
3077 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
3078 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3080 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
3081 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
3082 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
3083 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3085 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
3086 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
3087 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3089 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
3090 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
3091 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
3092 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3094 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
3095 renamed-aside and then recreated.
3096 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3098 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
3099 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
3100 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
3101 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3103 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
3104 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
3105 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3107 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
3108 processes will not intersperse their output.
3109 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
3112 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
3116 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
3117 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3119 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
3120 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3122 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
3123 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
3124 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
3125 the presence of the empty string argument.
3126 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3128 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
3129 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
3130 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
3131 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3133 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
3134 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3136 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
3137 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
3138 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3140 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
3141 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
3142 and with a malicious user on the same system
3143 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
3144 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
3147 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
3151 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
3152 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
3153 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3155 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
3156 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
3157 offending directory and all "contents."
3159 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
3160 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
3161 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
3163 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
3164 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
3165 without capabilities were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3167 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
3168 processes will not intersperse their output.
3169 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3170 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3172 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
3173 output the name of the file to stdout.
3174 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3176 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
3177 call fails with errno == EACCES.
3178 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3180 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
3181 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
3184 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
3185 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
3186 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
3188 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
3189 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
3190 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
3191 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
3192 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
3193 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3195 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
3196 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
3197 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
3198 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
3200 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
3201 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
3203 ** Changes in behavior
3205 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
3206 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
3207 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
3208 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
3209 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
3211 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
3212 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
3213 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
3214 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
3216 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
3218 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
3219 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
3220 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
3221 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
3222 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
3226 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
3230 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
3231 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
3233 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
3234 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3236 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3237 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3238 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3240 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3241 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3244 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3248 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3249 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3250 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3252 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3253 to accommodate leap seconds.
3254 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3256 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3257 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3258 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3260 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3262 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3263 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3264 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3266 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3267 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3268 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3269 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3270 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3274 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3275 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3276 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3277 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3279 ** Changes in behavior
3281 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3282 environment variable is set.
3284 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3285 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3286 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3290 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3291 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3292 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3293 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3295 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3296 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3297 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3298 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3302 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3303 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3304 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3306 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3307 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3308 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3309 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3310 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3311 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3312 another improvement:
3314 rm -r is now slightly more standard-conforming when operating on
3315 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3318 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3322 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3323 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3324 and libraries tested at configure time.
3325 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3327 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3328 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3330 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3331 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3333 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3334 printing a summary to stderr.
3335 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3337 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3338 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3339 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3341 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3342 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3344 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3345 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3346 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3347 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3349 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3350 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3351 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3352 which is relatively unusual.
3353 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3355 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3356 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3357 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3358 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3359 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3360 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3361 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3365 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3366 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3367 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3368 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3369 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3373 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3374 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3376 ** Changes in behavior
3378 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3379 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3380 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3381 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3382 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3385 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3389 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3390 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3392 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3393 before data copying has started.
3395 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3396 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3398 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3399 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3400 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3401 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3403 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3404 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3405 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3406 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3408 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3413 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3414 for its standard streams.
3416 ** Changes in behavior
3418 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3419 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3420 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3421 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3422 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3423 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3425 ** Deprecated options
3427 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3428 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3432 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3434 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3435 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3436 a btrfs file system.
3438 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3440 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3441 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3443 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3444 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3447 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3451 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3452 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3453 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3454 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3456 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3457 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3458 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3459 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3460 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3465 make check: two tests have been corrected
3469 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3470 inherited from gnulib.
3473 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3477 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3478 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3479 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3480 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3482 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3483 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3485 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3487 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3488 systems without xattr support.
3490 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3491 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3492 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3494 ** Changes in behavior
3496 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3497 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3498 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3499 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3501 ** Improved robustness
3503 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3504 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3505 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3506 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3507 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3508 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3509 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3510 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3511 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3515 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3516 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3518 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3519 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3520 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3521 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3522 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3525 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3529 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3530 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3531 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3535 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3536 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3537 data was read, or on process exit.
3538 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3540 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3541 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3542 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3543 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3545 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3546 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3547 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3548 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3550 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3551 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3553 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3554 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3556 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3557 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3558 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3560 ** Changes in behavior
3562 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3563 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3564 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3566 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3567 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3569 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3570 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3571 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3574 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3578 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3580 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3581 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3582 install: Never copies xattrs
3584 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3585 from overwriting any existing destination file
3587 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3588 mode where this feature is available.
3590 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3591 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3592 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3593 do not modify the destination at all.
3595 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3597 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3601 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3602 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3604 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3606 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3607 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3609 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3610 processing the first file name
3612 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3613 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3614 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3615 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3617 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3618 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3620 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3621 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3624 ** Changes in behavior
3626 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3627 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3629 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3630 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3631 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3633 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3634 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3636 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3638 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3639 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3640 is still marked with a '+'.
3643 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3647 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3648 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3652 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3653 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3654 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3655 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3656 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3657 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3659 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3660 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3662 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3663 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3665 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3667 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3668 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3669 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3671 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3672 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3674 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3675 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3676 used to factor large numbers.
3678 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3681 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3683 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3685 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3686 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3688 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3689 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3690 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3691 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3693 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3694 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3695 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3697 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3698 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3702 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3704 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3705 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3707 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3708 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3710 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3712 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3713 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3717 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3718 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3719 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3721 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3723 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3724 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3725 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3727 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3728 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3729 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3731 ** Changes in behavior
3733 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3734 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3737 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3741 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3742 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3743 'futimens' system calls.
3747 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3749 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3750 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3751 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3753 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3754 with no USERNAME argument.
3756 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3757 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3758 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3760 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3761 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3762 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3763 number of fields for some inputs.
3765 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3766 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3768 ** Changes in behavior
3770 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3771 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3774 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3778 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3780 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3781 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3782 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3783 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3785 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3786 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3788 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3789 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3791 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3792 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3794 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3795 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3796 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3797 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3799 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3800 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3801 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3802 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3803 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3804 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3806 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3807 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3809 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3810 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3811 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3813 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3814 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3816 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3817 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3819 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3820 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3821 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3822 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3824 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3825 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3827 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3828 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3830 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3831 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3832 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3836 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3837 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3839 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3840 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3841 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3842 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3846 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3847 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3849 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3851 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3855 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3856 which have negative errno values.
3860 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3864 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3868 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3869 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3872 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3876 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3877 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3878 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3880 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3881 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3882 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3883 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3887 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3888 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3889 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3890 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3893 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3897 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3899 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3900 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3901 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3904 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3908 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3909 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3911 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3913 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3915 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3917 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3921 ** Changes in behavior
3923 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3924 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3926 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3927 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3929 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3930 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3931 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3935 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3936 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3937 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3938 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3939 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3940 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3941 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3942 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3943 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3944 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3945 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3947 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3948 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3949 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3952 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3955 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3956 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3957 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3959 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3960 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3961 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3964 ** New build options
3966 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3967 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3968 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3969 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3971 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3972 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3973 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3974 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3975 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3976 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3977 of "make check" fail.
3979 ** Remove deprecated options
3981 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3982 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3983 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3984 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3985 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3987 ** Improved robustness
3989 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3990 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3991 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3992 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3993 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3994 loss of the contents of a/f.
3996 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3997 in its 35-colon command-line argument
4001 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
4002 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
4003 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
4005 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
4006 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
4007 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
4008 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4010 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
4011 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
4012 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
4013 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
4014 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
4015 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
4016 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
4017 destination is a symlink.
4019 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
4021 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
4022 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
4024 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
4025 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
4027 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
4029 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
4030 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
4032 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
4033 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
4035 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
4038 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
4039 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
4041 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
4042 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
4044 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
4045 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
4046 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
4047 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4049 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
4050 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
4051 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4053 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
4054 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
4055 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
4057 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
4058 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
4059 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
4060 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
4062 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
4063 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
4064 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
4066 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
4067 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
4069 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
4070 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
4072 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
4074 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
4075 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
4076 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
4078 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
4079 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
4081 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
4082 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
4084 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
4085 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
4087 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
4088 [present in the original version]
4091 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
4095 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
4097 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
4098 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
4099 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
4101 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
4102 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
4104 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
4108 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
4109 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
4111 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
4112 support but with insufficient /proc support.
4114 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
4115 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
4117 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
4118 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
4119 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
4120 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
4121 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
4122 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
4124 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
4125 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
4128 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
4129 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
4131 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
4134 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
4135 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
4136 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
4138 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
4139 directory is unreadable.
4141 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
4142 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
4143 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
4145 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
4146 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
4147 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
4148 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
4149 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
4152 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
4153 Before it would print nothing.
4155 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
4157 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
4158 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
4159 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
4160 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
4161 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
4162 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
4163 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
4164 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
4166 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
4170 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
4171 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
4172 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
4174 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
4175 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
4176 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
4177 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
4180 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
4184 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
4185 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
4186 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
4187 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
4188 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
4189 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
4190 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4192 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
4193 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
4194 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
4195 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
4196 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
4197 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
4198 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
4199 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4201 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
4202 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
4203 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
4206 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
4210 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
4211 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
4213 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
4214 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
4215 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
4217 ** Improved robustness
4219 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
4220 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
4221 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
4224 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
4228 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
4229 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
4230 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
4231 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
4232 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4234 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4238 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4241 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4245 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4246 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4247 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4248 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4250 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4251 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4253 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4254 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4255 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4258 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4260 ** Improved robustness
4262 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4263 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4265 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4266 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4267 or NFS-mounted partition.
4269 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4270 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4274 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4275 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4276 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4277 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4278 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4279 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4281 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4282 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4284 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4285 or neglect to report file removal.
4287 For the "groups" command:
4289 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4290 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4292 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4294 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4296 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4300 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4301 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4304 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4306 ** Changes in behavior
4308 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4309 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4310 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4311 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4313 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4314 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4315 a final './' or '../' component.
4317 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4318 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4319 this only for pipes.
4321 ** Infrastructure changes
4323 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4324 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4325 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4326 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4330 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4331 name is "." or "..".
4333 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4334 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4335 dirent.d_type support.
4337 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4338 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4340 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4341 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4342 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4343 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4346 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4348 ** Changes in behavior
4350 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4354 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4355 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4359 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4360 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4361 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4363 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4364 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4366 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4367 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4369 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4371 ** Improved robustness
4373 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4374 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4375 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4377 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4378 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4381 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4382 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4384 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4385 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4387 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4388 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4390 ** Changes in behavior
4392 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4393 where the two are distinct.
4395 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4396 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4397 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4398 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4399 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4400 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4401 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4402 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4403 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4404 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4405 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4406 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4407 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4408 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4409 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4410 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4411 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4413 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4414 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4415 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4417 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4418 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4419 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4420 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4423 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4424 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4428 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4429 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4430 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4431 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4433 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4434 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4435 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4437 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4438 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4439 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4440 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4441 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4444 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4445 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4447 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4448 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4449 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4450 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4452 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4453 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4454 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4456 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4457 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4458 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4459 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4461 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4462 and sticky) with the -m option.
4464 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4465 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4466 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4467 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4468 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4470 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4471 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4473 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4477 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4478 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4479 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4480 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4482 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4484 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4486 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4487 silently ignoring one of them.
4489 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4490 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4491 containing this change was 5.92.
4493 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4494 automatically newline terminated.
4496 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4497 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4498 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4499 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4502 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4503 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4504 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4507 ** Scheduled for removal
4509 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4510 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4512 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4513 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4514 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4515 command to unlink a directory.
4517 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4518 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4519 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4520 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4524 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4525 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4526 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4527 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4528 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4529 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4533 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4534 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4536 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4538 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4539 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4540 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4542 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4543 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4546 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4547 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4549 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4550 list directories before files.
4552 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4553 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4554 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4555 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4558 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4560 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4562 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4563 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4564 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4566 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4567 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4571 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4572 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4573 usually printing nothing.
4575 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4577 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4578 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4579 them with hard-linked directories.
4581 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4582 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4583 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4585 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4586 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4587 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4589 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4592 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4593 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4595 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4596 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4598 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4599 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4601 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4602 all command-line arguments.
4604 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4606 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4608 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4609 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4611 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4613 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4614 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4615 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4616 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4617 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4619 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4620 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4622 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4623 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4624 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4625 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4627 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4629 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4633 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4634 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4636 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4637 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4639 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4640 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4642 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4643 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4645 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4646 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4648 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4650 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4651 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4652 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4655 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4657 ** Build-related bug fixes
4659 installing .mo files would fail
4662 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4666 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4668 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4671 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4675 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4676 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4680 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4682 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4683 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4685 ** Deprecated options
4687 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4688 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4690 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4694 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4696 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4697 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4698 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4699 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4701 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4704 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4710 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4715 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4717 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4719 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4720 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4721 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4723 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4724 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4725 problematic usages. These include:
4727 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4728 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4729 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4730 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4731 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4732 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4733 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4734 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4735 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4737 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4738 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4740 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4741 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4742 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4743 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4745 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4746 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4747 between binary and text files.
4749 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4753 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4757 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4758 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4760 head tac tail tee tr
4761 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4763 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4764 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4766 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4767 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4768 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4770 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4772 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4774 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4775 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4776 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4780 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4782 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4783 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4785 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4786 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4787 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4791 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4792 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4796 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4797 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4798 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4802 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4803 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4807 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4809 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4811 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4815 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4816 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4817 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4819 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4820 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4821 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4822 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4823 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4825 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4829 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4830 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4831 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4833 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4835 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4836 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4837 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4838 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4840 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4842 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4843 rather than silently wrapping around.
4845 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4846 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4848 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4849 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4851 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4852 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4853 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4854 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4856 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4858 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4860 ** Improved robustness
4862 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4863 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4864 no matter how large the result.
4866 ** Improved portability
4868 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4869 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4871 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4873 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4874 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4875 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4877 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4878 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4882 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4883 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4885 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4887 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4888 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4889 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4890 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4892 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4893 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4895 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4896 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4897 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4899 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4901 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4902 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4904 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4905 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4907 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4909 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4910 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4912 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4913 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4915 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4916 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4917 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4919 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4921 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4923 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4927 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4929 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4930 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4931 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4933 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4934 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4936 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4937 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4938 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4940 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4941 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4943 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4944 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4945 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4946 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4948 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4949 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4951 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4952 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4953 the file system does not support it.
4955 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4957 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4958 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4960 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4962 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4963 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4965 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4966 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4967 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4968 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4970 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4971 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4974 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4975 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4976 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4977 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4979 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4980 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4981 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4982 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4984 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4985 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4987 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4989 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4990 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4991 reporting incorrect results.
4995 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4996 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4998 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
5001 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
5003 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
5004 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
5006 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
5007 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
5009 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
5012 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
5013 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
5014 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
5015 the file name does not look like a page range.
5017 printf has several changes:
5019 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
5020 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
5022 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
5023 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
5024 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
5026 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
5027 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
5030 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
5031 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
5033 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
5034 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
5036 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
5038 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
5039 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
5041 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
5043 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
5045 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
5046 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
5047 when first encountering the directory.
5051 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
5052 output; POSIX requires this.
5054 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
5055 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
5057 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
5059 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
5060 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
5062 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
5063 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
5065 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
5066 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
5067 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
5068 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
5069 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
5070 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
5071 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
5073 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
5074 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
5075 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
5077 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
5078 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
5080 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
5082 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
5084 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
5085 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
5086 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
5087 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
5089 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
5093 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
5094 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
5095 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
5096 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
5097 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
5099 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
5100 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
5101 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
5103 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
5104 is longer than PATH_MAX.
5106 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
5107 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
5109 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
5110 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
5111 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
5112 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
5113 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
5115 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
5116 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
5118 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
5119 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
5121 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
5123 nocreat do not create the output file
5124 excl fail if the output file already exists
5125 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
5126 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
5128 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
5130 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
5131 direct use direct I/O for data
5132 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
5133 sync likewise, but also for metadata
5134 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
5135 nofollow do not follow symlinks
5136 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
5138 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
5140 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
5141 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
5144 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
5145 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
5146 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
5147 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
5148 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
5149 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
5151 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
5152 list of NUL-terminated file names.
5154 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
5157 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
5159 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
5161 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
5162 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
5164 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
5165 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
5166 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
5168 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
5169 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
5170 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
5172 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
5174 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
5175 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
5177 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
5178 for compatibility with bash.
5180 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
5182 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
5183 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
5184 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
5185 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
5187 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
5188 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
5190 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
5191 ls supports TABSIZE.
5192 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
5193 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
5194 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
5196 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
5199 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
5201 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
5202 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
5203 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
5204 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
5205 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
5206 an offset, not as a file name.
5208 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
5209 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
5211 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
5212 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
5214 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
5215 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
5217 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
5218 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
5219 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
5221 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
5222 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
5224 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
5225 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
5229 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
5231 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
5233 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5237 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5238 or more arguments between partitions.
5240 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5241 holes in the destination.
5243 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5244 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5245 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5246 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5247 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5248 terminates immediately.
5250 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5252 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5254 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5255 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5256 not the empty string.
5258 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5259 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5263 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5264 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5265 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5268 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5275 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5279 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5280 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5282 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5283 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5285 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5286 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5287 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5290 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5294 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5295 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5297 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5298 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5300 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5301 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5302 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5304 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5306 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5309 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5311 ** Configuration option
5313 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5314 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5318 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5319 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5323 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5324 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5325 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5328 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5329 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5330 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5331 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5332 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5333 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5334 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5337 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5341 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5342 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5343 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5345 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5346 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5348 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5350 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5351 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5352 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5353 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5355 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5357 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5358 not just the ones that reference directories
5360 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5361 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5363 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5364 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5365 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5367 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5368 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5369 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5370 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5371 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5372 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5374 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5379 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5380 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5382 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5384 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5386 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5388 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5389 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5391 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5392 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5394 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5396 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5400 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5402 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5404 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5405 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5406 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5407 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5408 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5410 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5411 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5413 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5414 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5416 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5417 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5419 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5420 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5421 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5425 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5426 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5427 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5428 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5429 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5430 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5431 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5432 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5433 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5434 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5435 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5436 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5437 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5438 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5440 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5442 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5443 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5445 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5447 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5449 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5450 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5452 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5454 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5455 without a trailing newline.
5457 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5458 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5460 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5463 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5467 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5469 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5471 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5472 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5473 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5474 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5476 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5478 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5479 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5480 be printed without leading spaces.
5482 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5483 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5488 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5489 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5490 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5492 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5494 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5495 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5497 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5498 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5500 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5501 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5503 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5505 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5507 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5509 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5510 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5512 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5514 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5516 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5517 byte offsets are specified.
5520 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5523 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5526 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5527 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5528 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5529 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5530 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5531 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5532 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5533 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5534 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5535 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5536 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5537 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5538 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5539 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5540 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5541 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5542 directory where M has write access.
5543 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5544 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5545 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5548 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5549 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5550 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5551 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5552 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5553 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5554 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5555 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5556 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5557 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5558 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5559 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5560 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5561 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5562 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5563 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5564 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5565 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5566 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5567 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5568 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5569 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5570 appeared one additional time.
5572 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5573 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5574 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5575 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5578 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5579 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5580 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5581 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5582 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5583 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5584 if there were more than 338.
5586 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5587 - false --help now exits nonzero
5590 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5591 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5592 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5593 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5596 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5597 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5598 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5599 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5600 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5603 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5604 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5605 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5606 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5607 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5608 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5609 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5612 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5613 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5614 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5615 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5616 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5617 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5619 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5620 under certain unusual conditions
5621 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5622 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5625 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5626 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5627 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5628 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5629 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5630 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5631 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5632 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5633 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5634 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5635 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5636 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5637 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5638 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5639 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5640 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5643 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5644 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5647 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5648 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5649 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5650 involving hard-linked directories
5651 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5652 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5653 character-special and block files
5656 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5657 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5658 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5659 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5660 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5661 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5662 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5663 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5664 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5666 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5667 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5668 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5669 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5670 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5671 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5672 specified on the command line.
5673 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5674 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5675 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5676 the first file untouched.
5677 * readlink: new program
5678 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5679 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5680 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5681 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5682 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5683 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5686 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5687 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5688 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5689 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5690 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5691 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5692 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5693 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5694 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5695 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5696 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5697 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5699 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5700 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5701 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5703 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5704 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5705 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5706 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5707 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5708 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5709 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5710 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5713 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5714 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5717 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5718 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5719 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5720 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5721 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5722 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5723 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5726 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5727 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5729 ========================================================================
5730 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5731 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5734 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5736 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5737 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5738 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5739 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5740 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5741 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5742 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5743 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5744 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5745 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5746 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5747 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5749 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5750 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5751 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5752 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5754 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5757 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5759 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5760 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5761 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5762 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5763 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5764 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5765 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5768 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5769 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5770 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5771 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5772 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5773 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5774 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5775 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5776 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5777 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5778 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5779 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5780 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5781 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5782 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5783 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5785 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5786 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5788 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5789 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5790 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5791 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5792 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5793 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5795 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5796 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5797 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5798 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5799 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5800 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5801 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5803 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5804 the source files in the following example:
5805 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5806 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5807 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5808 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5809 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5810 links between source files with --preserve=links
5811 * cp accepts new options:
5812 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5813 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5814 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5815 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5816 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5817 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5818 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5819 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5820 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5822 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5823 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5824 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5825 even though it's older than dest.
5826 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5827 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5828 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5829 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5830 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5832 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5833 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5834 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5835 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5836 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5837 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5838 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5840 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5841 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5842 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5844 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5845 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5846 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5847 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5848 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5849 This is the default.
5851 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5852 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5853 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5854 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5855 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5857 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5860 ========================================================================
5861 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5862 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5865 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5866 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5868 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5869 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5870 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5871 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5872 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5874 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5875 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5876 that specifies a non-directory
5879 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5880 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5881 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5882 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5883 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5884 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5885 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5886 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5887 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5888 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5889 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5890 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5891 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5892 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5893 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5894 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5895 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5896 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5897 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5898 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5899 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5900 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5901 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5902 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5904 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5905 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5906 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5908 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5910 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5911 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5913 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5914 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5915 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5916 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5917 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5919 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5920 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5921 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5922 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5923 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5925 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5927 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5928 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5929 * still more portability fixes
5930 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5931 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5933 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5935 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5937 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5939 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5940 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5941 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5942 there is any time remaining
5943 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5945 ========================================================================
5946 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5947 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5949 This package began as the union of the following:
5950 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5952 ========================================================================
5954 Copyright (C) 2001-2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5956 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5957 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5958 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5959 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5960 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5961 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.