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1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
3 ** Functionality Changes
4 *** xargs no longer treats a line containing only an underscore as a logical end-of-file. To obtain the behaviour that was previously the default, use "-E_".
5 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
6 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
7 now deprecated.
8 ** Bug Fixes
9 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
10 Previously, it waited until NUM items had been read, and then
11 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
12 for next time.
13 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
14 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
15 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
16 ** Documentation improvements
17 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
18 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
20 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
21 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
22 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
23 findutils-4.2.8.
25 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
26 ** Functionality Changes
27 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
28 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
29 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
30 ** Documentation improvements
31 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
32 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
33 are not are explained in this chapter.
34 ** Bug Fixes
35 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
36 have it.
37 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
38 on Solaris).
39 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
40 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
42 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
43 ** Bug Fixes
44 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
45 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
46 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
47 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
48 #9043.
50 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
51 ** Functionality Changes
52 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
53 find will follow symbolic links.
54 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
55 it is the default).
56 ** Documentation improvements
57 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
58 ** Bug Fixes
59 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
60 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
61 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
62 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
63 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
64 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
65 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
67 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
68 ** Functionality Changes
69 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
70 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
71 locate).
72 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
73 doesn't support that much).
74 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
75 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
76 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
77 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
78 by the use of the -nowarn option.
79 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
80 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
81 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
82 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
83 grep -c).
84 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
85 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
86 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
87 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
88 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
89 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
90 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
91 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
92 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
93 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
94 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
95 ** Bug Fixes
96 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
97 systems that have non-writable string constants.
98 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
99 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
100 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
101 value).
102 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
104 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
105 ** Functionality Changes
106 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
107 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
108 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
109 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
110 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
111 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
112 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
113 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
114 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
115 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
116 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
117 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
118 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
119 directory we've just returned out of).
120 ** Other Changes
121 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
123 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
124 ** Documentation improvements
125 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
126 ** Bug Fixes
127 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
128 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
129 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
130 ** Other Changes
131 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
132 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
133 now.
134 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
135 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
136 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
137 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
139 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
140 ** Bug Fixes
141 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
142 requires it, as explained at
143 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
145 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
146 ** Bug Fixes
147 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
148 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
149 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
150 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
151 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
152 ** Other Changes
153 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
155 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
156 ** Functionality Changes
157 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
158 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
159 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
160 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
161 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
162 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
163 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
164 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
165 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
166 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
167 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
168 find stats the file. There is also an option
169 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
170 ** Documentation improvements
171 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
172 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
173 The find manual page also now includes a section
174 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
175 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
176 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
177 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
178 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
179 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
180 has been improved.
181 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
182 ** Bug Fixes
183 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
184 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
185 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
186 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
187 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
188 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
189 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
190 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
191 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
192 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
193 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
194 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
195 database if it fails.
196 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
197 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
198 locate database.
199 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
200 This was broken in 4.1.20.
202 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
203 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
204 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
205 a gap just in case.
206 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
207 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
208 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
209 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
210 README-CVS).
211 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
213 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
214 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
215 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
217 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
218 correct bug in prune.
219 added --ignore-case option for locate
221 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
222 Add support for large files
224 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
225 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
227 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
228 added internationalization and localization.
230 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
231 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
232 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
234 * Major changes in release 4.1:
236 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
237 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
238 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
239 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
240 \f
241 * Major changes in release 4.0:
243 ** Documentation:
244 *** Texinfo manual.
245 *** Man page for updatedb.
246 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
248 ** find:
249 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
250 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
251 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
252 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
253 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
254 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
256 ** locate:
257 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
258 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
259 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
260 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
261 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
262 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
263 some systems.
264 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
266 ** updatedb:
267 *** Takes command-line options.
269 ** xargs:
270 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
271 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
272 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
273 \f
274 * Major changes in release 3.8:
276 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
277 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
278 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
279 \f
280 * Major changes in release 3.7:
282 ** locate can search multiple databases
283 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
284 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
286 --//--
287 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
289 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
290 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
291 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
292 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
293 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf