1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 ls and printf fix shell quoted output in the edge case of escaped
8 first and last characters, and single quotes in the string.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
11 mv works again with macFUSE file systems. Previously it would
12 have exited with a "Function not implemented" error.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
17 sort operates more efficiently when used on pseudo files with
18 an apparent size of 0, like those in /proc.
21 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.5 (2024-03-28) [stable]
25 chmod -R now avoids a race where an attacker may replace a traversed file
26 with a symlink, causing chmod to operate on an unintended file.
27 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
29 cp, mv, and install no longer issue spurious diagnostics like "failed
30 to preserve ownership" when copying to GNU/Linux CIFS file systems.
31 They do this by working around some Linux CIFS bugs.
33 cp --no-preserve=mode will correctly maintain set-group-ID bits
34 for created directories. Previously on systems that didn't support ACLs,
35 cp would have reset the set-group-ID bit on created directories.
36 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
38 join and uniq now support multi-byte characters better.
39 For example, 'join -tX' now works even if X is a multi-byte character,
40 and both programs now treat multi-byte characters like U+3000
41 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE as blanks if the current locale treats them so.
43 numfmt options like --suffix no longer have an arbitrary 127-byte limit.
44 [bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]
46 mktemp with --suffix now better diagnoses templates with too few X's.
47 Previously it conflated the insignificant --suffix in the error.
48 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
50 sort again handles thousands grouping characters in single-byte locales
51 where the grouping character is greater than CHAR_MAX. For e.g. signed
52 character platforms with a 0xA0 (aka  ) grouping character.
53 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
55 split --line-bytes with a mixture of very long and short lines
56 no longer overwrites the heap (CVE-2024-0684).
57 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
59 tail no longer mishandles input from files in /proc and /sys file systems,
60 on systems with a page size larger than the stdio BUFSIZ.
61 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
63 timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might kill arbitrary
64 processes after a failed process fork.
65 [bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]
67 timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might fail to
68 kill monitored processes immediately after forking them.
69 [bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]
71 wc no longer fails to count unprintable characters as parts of words.
72 [bug introduced in textutils-2.1]
74 ** Changes in behavior
76 base32 and base64 no longer require padding when decoding.
77 Previously an error was given for non padded encoded data.
79 base32 and base64 have improved detection of corrupted encodings.
80 Previously encodings with non zero padding bits were accepted.
82 basenc --base16 -d now supports lower case hexadecimal characters.
83 Previously an error was given for lower case hex digits.
85 cp --no-clobber, and mv -n no longer exit with failure status if
86 existing files are encountered in the destination. Instead they revert
87 to the behavior from before v9.2, silently skipping existing files.
89 ls --dired now implies long format output without hyperlinks enabled,
90 and will take precedence over previously specified formats or hyperlink mode.
92 numfmt will accept lowercase 'k' to indicate Kilo or Kibi units on input,
93 and uses lowercase 'k' when outputting such units in '--to=si' mode.
95 pinky no longer tries to canonicalize the user's login location by default,
96 rather requiring the new --lookup option to enable this often slow feature.
98 wc no longer ignores encoding errors when counting words.
99 Instead, it treats them as non white space.
103 chgrp now accepts the --from=OWNER:GROUP option to restrict changes to files
104 with matching current OWNER and/or GROUP, as already supported by chown(1).
106 chmod adds support for -h, -H,-L,-P, and --dereference options, providing
107 more control over symlink handling. This supports more secure handling of
108 CLI arguments, and is more consistent with chown, and chmod on other systems.
110 cp now accepts the --keep-directory-symlink option (like tar), to preserve
111 and follow existing symlinks to directories in the destination.
113 cp and mv now accept the --update=none-fail option, which is similar
114 to the --no-clobber option, except that existing files are diagnosed,
115 and the command exits with failure status if existing files.
116 The -n,--no-clobber option is best avoided due to platform differences.
118 env now accepts the -a,--argv0 option to override the zeroth argument
119 of the command being executed.
121 mv now accepts an --exchange option, which causes the source and
122 destination to be exchanged. It should be combined with
123 --no-target-directory (-T) if the destination is a directory.
124 The exchange is atomic if source and destination are on a single
125 file system that supports atomic exchange; --exchange is not yet
126 supported in other situations.
128 od now supports printing IEEE half precision floating point with -t fH,
129 or brain 16 bit floating point with -t fB, where supported by the compiler.
131 tail now supports following multiple processes, with repeated --pid options.
135 cp,mv,install,cat,split now read and write a minimum of 256KiB at a time.
136 This was previously 128KiB and increasing to 256KiB was seen to increase
137 throughput by 10-20% when reading cached files on modern systems.
139 env,kill,timeout now support unnamed signals. kill(1) for example now
140 supports sending such signals, and env(1) will list them appropriately.
142 SELinux operations in file copy operations are now more efficient,
143 avoiding unneeded MCS/MLS label translation.
145 sort no longer dynamically links to libcrypto unless -R is used.
146 This decreases startup overhead in the typical case.
148 wc is now much faster in single-byte locales and somewhat faster in
152 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.4 (2023-08-29) [stable]
156 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
157 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
158 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
160 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
161 presented with malformed checksum lines.
162 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
164 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
165 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
166 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
168 'cp --sparse=never' will avoid copy-on-write (reflinking) and copy offloading,
169 to ensure no holes present in the destination copy.
170 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
172 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
173 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
175 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
176 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
177 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
178 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
180 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
181 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
182 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
184 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
185 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
187 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
188 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
189 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
191 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
192 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
193 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
195 pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
196 platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
197 Also see the new --enable-systemd option mentioned below.
198 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
200 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
201 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
203 shred again operates on Solaris when built for 64 bits.
204 Previously it would have exited with a "getrandom: Invalid argument" error.
205 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
207 tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
208 erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
209 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
211 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD,
212 and is being built again on FreeBSD and Haiku.
213 [bugs introduced in coreutils-9.2]
215 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
216 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
217 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
219 ** Changes in behavior
221 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
222 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
223 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
225 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
226 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
227 checksum utilities with cksum.
229 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
230 Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
231 where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
232 Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
233 Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
234 [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
238 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
239 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
240 reinstating that behavior from coreutils-9.0.
242 comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
243 write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
245 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
246 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
248 split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
250 tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
252 'who -a' now displays the boot time on Alpine Linux, OpenBSD,
253 Cygwin, Haiku, and some Android distributions
255 'uptime' now succeeds on some Android distributions, and now counts
256 VM saved/sleep time on GNU (Linux, Hurd, kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD,
259 On GNU/Linux platforms where utmp-format files have 32-bit timestamps,
260 pinky, uptime, and who can now work for times after the year 2038,
261 so long as systemd is installed, you configure with a new, experimental
262 option --enable-systemd, and you use the programs without file arguments.
263 (For example, with systemd 'who /var/log/wtmp' does not work because
264 systemd does not support the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp.)
267 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
271 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
272 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
273 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
274 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
275 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
277 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
278 Previously it may have issued "File exists" errors when
279 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
280 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
282 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
283 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
284 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
286 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
287 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
288 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
289 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
291 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
292 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
294 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
295 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
296 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
298 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
299 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
300 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
301 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
303 ** Changes in behavior
305 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
306 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
307 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
308 due to -n, -i, or -u.
312 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
313 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
314 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
317 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
321 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
322 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
323 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
324 total line in this case.
325 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
327 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
328 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
329 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
331 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
332 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
334 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
335 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
336 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
337 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
339 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
340 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
341 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
342 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
343 which may have resulted in data corruption.
344 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
346 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
347 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
348 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
350 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
351 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
353 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
354 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
355 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
357 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
358 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
359 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
361 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
362 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
363 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
365 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
366 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
367 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
368 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
369 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
371 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
372 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
373 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
374 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
375 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
377 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
378 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
379 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
381 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
382 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
383 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
385 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
386 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
387 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
388 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
390 ** Changes in behavior
392 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
393 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
394 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
395 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
396 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
397 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
399 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
400 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
402 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
403 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
404 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
405 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
407 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
408 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
409 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
411 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
412 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
413 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
414 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
416 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
417 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
418 This behavior is now documented.
420 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
421 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
423 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
424 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
425 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
427 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
428 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
429 from errors from the invoked command.
431 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
432 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
433 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
436 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
440 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
441 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
443 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
444 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
446 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
447 print details on how a file is being copied.
449 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
450 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
452 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
453 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
455 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
456 asked to move a file to a different file system.
458 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
459 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
461 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
462 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
464 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
465 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
469 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
470 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
471 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
472 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
473 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
475 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
476 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
478 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
479 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
481 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
482 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
483 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
485 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
486 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
487 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
489 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
490 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
492 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
493 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
494 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
495 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
498 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
502 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
503 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
504 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
506 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
507 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
508 before adjusting it to the correct value.
509 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
511 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
512 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
513 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
515 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
516 and B is in some other file system.
517 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
519 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
520 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
521 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
523 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
524 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
526 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
527 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
528 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
529 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
530 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
532 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
533 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
534 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
536 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
537 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
538 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
540 ** Changes in behavior
542 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
543 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
544 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
546 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
547 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
548 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
549 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
551 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
552 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
554 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
555 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
556 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
558 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
559 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
561 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
562 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
563 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
564 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
565 though they still work.
567 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
568 capabilities are rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
569 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
571 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
572 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
574 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
575 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
576 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
578 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
579 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
580 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
581 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
585 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
586 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
588 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
589 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
591 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
592 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
596 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
597 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
599 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
600 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
601 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
604 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
606 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
607 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
608 since synchronizing can take a long time.
610 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
612 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
613 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
615 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
617 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
618 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
619 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
623 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
624 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
627 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
631 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
632 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
634 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
635 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
636 is a non regular file.
637 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
639 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
640 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
641 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
643 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
644 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
646 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
647 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
649 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
650 heavily changed during the run.
651 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
653 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
654 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
656 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
657 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
659 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstattable files.
660 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
662 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
663 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
665 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
666 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
667 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
669 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
670 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
672 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
673 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
675 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
676 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
677 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
679 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
680 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
681 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
683 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
684 invalid combinations of case character classes.
685 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
687 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
688 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
689 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
691 ** Changes in behavior
693 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
694 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
696 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
697 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
698 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
700 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
701 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
702 that was made in release 8.32.
704 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
705 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
706 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
708 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
709 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
711 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
712 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
716 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
717 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
718 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
719 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
721 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
723 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
724 when verifying tagged format checksums.
726 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
728 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
729 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
731 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
732 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
734 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
735 NUL instead of newline.
737 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
739 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
740 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
741 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
745 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
746 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
748 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
749 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
750 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
752 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
753 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
755 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
756 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
758 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
759 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
761 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
762 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
763 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
765 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
767 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
768 where avx2 instructions are supported.
769 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
772 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
776 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
777 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
778 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
780 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
781 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
782 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
783 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
784 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
786 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
787 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
788 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
789 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
790 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
791 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
793 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
794 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
796 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
797 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
798 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
799 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
801 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
802 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
803 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
804 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
806 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
807 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
809 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
810 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
811 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
812 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
814 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
815 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
816 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
818 ** Changes in behavior
820 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
821 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
822 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
823 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
824 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
827 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
828 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
829 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
830 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
831 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
832 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
833 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
834 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
837 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
838 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
839 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
840 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
842 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
843 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
844 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
846 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
847 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
851 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
852 file creation time, where available.
854 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
855 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
857 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
858 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
859 useful on network file systems.
863 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
864 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
866 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
867 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
868 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
872 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
875 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
879 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
880 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
882 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
883 after asking the user whether to proceed.
884 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
886 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
887 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
889 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
890 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
891 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
893 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
894 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
895 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
896 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
897 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
898 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
900 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
901 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
903 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
904 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
906 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
907 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
908 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
910 ** Changes in behavior
912 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
913 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
914 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
915 end-of-options marker.
917 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
920 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
921 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
923 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
924 environment variable is set.
926 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
927 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
928 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
929 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
930 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
932 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
934 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
935 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
936 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
937 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
939 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
940 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
944 id now supports specifying multiple users.
946 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
947 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
949 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
950 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
951 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
952 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
953 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
954 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
956 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
957 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
959 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
960 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
962 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
963 signal handling before executing a program.
967 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
968 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
969 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
973 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
974 which is common in Asian locales.
976 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
977 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
979 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
980 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
983 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
987 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
988 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
989 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
990 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
991 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
992 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
994 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
995 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
996 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
997 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
999 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
1000 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
1001 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
1002 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
1003 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
1004 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
1006 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
1007 even if it can't be traversed.
1008 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
1010 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
1011 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
1012 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
1014 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
1015 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1017 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
1018 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
1019 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
1020 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
1021 now silently does nothing if A exists.
1022 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
1024 ** Changes in behavior
1026 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
1027 it is self referential.
1029 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
1033 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
1035 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
1036 each processing step.
1038 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
1039 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
1042 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
1043 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
1044 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
1046 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
1047 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
1051 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
1052 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
1054 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
1055 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
1056 and tail -f uses inotify.
1058 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
1059 which is especially significant on macOS.
1062 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
1066 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
1067 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
1069 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
1070 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
1071 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
1072 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
1074 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
1075 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1077 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
1078 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1080 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
1081 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
1082 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
1084 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
1085 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1087 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
1088 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
1089 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1091 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
1092 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
1093 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
1094 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
1095 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1099 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
1103 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
1105 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
1106 rather than reading from the start.
1108 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
1109 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
1110 for unknown long options.
1114 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
1115 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
1118 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
1122 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
1123 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
1124 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
1125 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1127 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
1128 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
1129 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
1130 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
1131 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1133 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
1134 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
1135 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
1136 now fails instead of losing the data.
1137 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1139 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
1140 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
1141 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1143 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
1144 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
1145 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1147 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
1148 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
1149 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1151 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
1152 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
1153 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1155 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
1156 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
1157 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1159 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
1160 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
1161 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
1163 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
1164 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
1165 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1167 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
1168 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
1169 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1171 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
1172 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1174 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
1175 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
1176 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1178 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
1179 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1181 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
1182 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
1183 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
1184 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1186 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
1187 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
1188 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1190 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
1191 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
1192 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1194 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
1195 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1199 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1200 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1201 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1203 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1204 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1206 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1207 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1209 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1210 executing the subsidiary program.
1212 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1214 ** Changes in behavior
1216 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1217 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1218 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1219 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1223 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1225 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1226 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1228 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1229 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1230 is effective in this case.
1233 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1237 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1238 as appropriate for the -a, --preserve=context, or -Z options.
1239 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1241 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1242 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1243 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1245 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1246 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1247 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1249 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1250 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1251 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1253 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1254 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1255 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1257 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1258 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1259 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1260 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1261 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1263 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1264 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1265 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1266 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1270 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1271 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1272 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1273 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1275 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1276 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1277 time zone is indeterminate.
1279 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1280 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1281 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1282 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1284 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1285 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1286 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1288 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1289 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1291 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1292 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1293 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1297 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1298 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1299 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1302 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1306 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1307 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1310 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1311 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1312 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1314 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1315 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1316 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1317 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1318 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1320 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1321 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1322 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1324 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1325 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1327 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1328 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1329 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1331 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1332 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1333 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1335 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1336 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1338 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1339 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1340 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1342 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1343 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1345 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1346 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1347 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1349 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1351 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1352 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1354 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1355 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1357 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1358 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1360 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1361 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1363 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1364 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1365 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1366 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1368 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1369 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1370 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1372 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1373 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1374 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1376 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1377 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1378 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1380 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1381 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1382 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1384 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1385 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1387 ** Changes in behavior
1389 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1391 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1392 values for any argument.
1394 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1395 they are out of localtime range.
1397 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1398 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1399 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1400 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1404 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1405 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1406 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1408 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1409 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1411 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1412 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1414 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1416 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1417 written to a terminal.
1419 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1420 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1422 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1423 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1424 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1425 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1426 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1427 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1428 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1429 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1430 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1431 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1432 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1434 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1435 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1439 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1440 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1444 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1446 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1447 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1449 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1452 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1456 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1457 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1458 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1459 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1461 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1462 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1464 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1465 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1466 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1468 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1469 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1471 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1472 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1473 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1475 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1476 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1478 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1479 that specify an offset for the first field.
1480 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1482 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1483 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1487 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1488 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1492 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1493 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1495 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1496 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1497 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1498 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1499 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1501 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1502 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1503 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1505 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1506 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1507 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1509 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1510 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1512 ** Changes in behavior
1514 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1515 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1517 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1518 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1520 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1521 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1523 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1524 when outputting to a terminal.
1526 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1530 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1531 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1533 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1534 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1536 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1537 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1538 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1540 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1541 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1543 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1544 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1545 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1547 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1549 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1550 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1551 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1553 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1554 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1557 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1561 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1562 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1564 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1565 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1567 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1568 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1569 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1571 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1572 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1573 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1574 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1576 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1577 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1578 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1579 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1581 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1582 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1584 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1585 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1587 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1588 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1589 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1591 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1592 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1593 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1595 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1596 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1597 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1599 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1600 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1601 character at the 4GiB position.
1602 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1604 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1605 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1607 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1608 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1610 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1611 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1612 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1614 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1615 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1617 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1618 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1619 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1621 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1622 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1624 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1625 when those files are being created or renamed.
1626 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1630 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1631 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1632 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1633 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1635 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1636 on stderr approximately every second.
1638 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1639 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1641 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1642 other than the default newline character.
1644 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1645 a useful setting with high latency links.
1647 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1648 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1650 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1651 and output errors in general.
1653 ** Changes in behavior
1655 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1656 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1657 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1658 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1660 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1661 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1662 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1663 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1664 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1666 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1667 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1669 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1671 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1672 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1674 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1675 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1679 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1680 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1682 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1683 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1685 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1686 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1688 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1689 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1691 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1693 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1694 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1695 documentation are provided.
1698 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1702 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1703 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1705 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1706 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1707 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1708 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1710 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1711 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1712 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1713 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1715 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1716 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1718 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1719 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1721 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1722 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1723 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1724 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1725 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1726 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1727 values are in octal.
1740 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1742 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1743 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1744 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1745 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1746 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1747 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1749 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1750 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1751 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1752 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1754 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1755 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1756 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1758 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1759 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1760 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1761 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1763 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1764 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1765 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1767 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1768 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1769 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1771 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1772 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1773 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1774 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1775 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1777 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1778 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1779 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1781 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1782 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1784 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1785 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1786 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1788 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1789 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1791 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1792 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1794 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1795 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1797 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1798 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1800 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1801 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1802 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1804 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1805 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1809 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1810 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1812 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1813 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1814 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1815 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1816 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1817 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1818 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1819 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1820 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1821 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1822 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1823 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1824 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1825 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1826 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1827 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1828 it suitable for embedded system.
1830 ** Changes in behavior
1832 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1833 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1835 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1836 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1838 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1839 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1840 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1842 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1843 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1844 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1848 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1849 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1850 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1852 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1854 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1855 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1856 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1858 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1859 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1860 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1861 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1863 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1864 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1866 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1867 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1868 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1871 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1875 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstattable
1876 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1877 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1879 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1880 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1881 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1882 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1884 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1885 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1886 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1888 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1889 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1891 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1893 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1894 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1895 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1897 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1898 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1899 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1901 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1902 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1903 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1904 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1906 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1907 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1908 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1910 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1911 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1912 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1914 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1915 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1917 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1918 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1919 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1920 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1922 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1923 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1924 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1926 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1927 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1928 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1932 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1933 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1934 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1936 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1937 used to identify the split points.
1939 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1940 command line argument through to the output.
1942 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1945 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1946 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1948 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1949 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1951 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1953 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1954 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1955 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1957 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1958 unique groups with empty lines.
1960 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1961 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1963 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1966 ** Changes in behavior
1968 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1969 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1970 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1971 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1973 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1974 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1976 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1977 not just the transfer counts.
1979 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1981 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1982 as per the documented interface.
1986 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1988 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1989 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1990 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1991 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1993 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1994 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1995 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1996 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1998 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1999 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
2000 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
2002 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
2003 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
2005 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
2006 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
2008 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
2012 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2015 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
2019 numfmt: reformat numbers
2023 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
2024 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
2025 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
2027 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
2028 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
2029 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
2031 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
2032 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
2036 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
2037 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2039 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
2040 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
2041 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2043 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
2044 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
2045 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2047 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
2048 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
2049 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2051 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
2052 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
2053 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
2055 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
2056 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
2057 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
2059 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
2060 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2062 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
2063 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
2065 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
2066 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
2067 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
2069 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
2070 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
2071 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2073 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
2074 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
2075 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2077 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
2078 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
2079 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
2080 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2082 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
2083 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
2084 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2086 ** Changes in behavior
2088 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
2089 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
2090 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
2091 'total' in the target column.
2093 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
2094 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
2095 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
2097 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
2098 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
2100 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
2101 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
2105 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
2106 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2108 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
2109 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
2111 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
2115 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
2116 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
2117 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
2118 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
2119 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
2120 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
2121 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
2122 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
2123 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
2124 for a patched distribution package.
2126 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
2127 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2129 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
2130 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
2131 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
2132 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2135 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
2139 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
2141 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
2142 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
2143 sha384sum and sha512sum.
2147 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
2148 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
2149 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
2150 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
2151 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
2153 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
2154 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
2156 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
2157 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
2158 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
2159 eventually exits nonzero.
2161 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
2162 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
2163 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
2164 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
2165 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
2167 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
2168 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
2169 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
2171 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
2172 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
2173 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
2175 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
2176 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
2177 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2179 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
2180 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
2181 Before, this would infloop:
2182 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
2183 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2185 ** Changes in behavior
2187 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
2191 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
2192 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
2193 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
2194 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
2195 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2198 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2199 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2200 format-changing options.
2202 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2203 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2204 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2205 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2206 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2210 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2211 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2212 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2213 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2214 are run without following the instructions in README.
2216 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2217 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2218 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2219 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2220 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2221 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2222 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2225 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2229 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2230 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2231 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2232 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2234 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2235 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2236 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2237 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2239 sort -u could read freed memory.
2240 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2241 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2242 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2246 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2247 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2248 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2249 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2252 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2256 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2257 processes will not intersperse their output.
2258 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2260 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2261 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2262 date: invalid date '\260'
2263 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2265 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2266 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2267 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2268 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2270 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2271 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2272 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2274 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2275 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2276 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2277 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2278 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2279 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2281 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2282 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2284 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2285 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2287 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2288 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2289 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2291 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2292 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2293 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2297 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2299 ** Changes in behavior
2301 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2302 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2303 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2304 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2305 have any reason to include it here.
2309 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2310 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2311 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2313 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2314 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2315 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2318 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2322 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2323 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2324 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2325 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2326 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2327 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2329 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2330 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2331 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2332 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2333 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2334 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2335 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2337 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2338 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2340 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2341 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2345 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2346 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2348 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2350 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2352 ** Changes in behavior
2354 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2355 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2356 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2358 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2359 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2362 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2366 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2367 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2368 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2369 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2370 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2371 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2372 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2373 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2375 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2376 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2377 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2378 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2379 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2381 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2382 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2384 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2385 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2387 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2388 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2390 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2391 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2393 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2394 additional static suffix to output file names.
2396 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2397 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2398 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2400 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2401 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2405 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2406 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2407 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2409 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2410 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2411 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2412 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2413 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2414 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2416 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2417 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2418 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2419 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2420 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2422 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2423 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2424 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2425 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2429 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2430 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2431 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2433 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2434 instead of causing a usage failure.
2436 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2439 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2443 realpath: print resolved file names.
2447 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2448 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2450 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2451 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2453 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2454 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2455 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2456 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2457 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2458 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2460 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2461 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2462 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2464 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2465 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2466 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2468 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2469 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2470 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2471 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2472 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2474 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2476 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2477 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2479 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2480 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2481 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2483 ** Changes in behavior
2485 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2486 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2487 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2488 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2489 usually-short referent instead.
2491 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2492 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2493 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2494 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2497 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2501 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2502 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2503 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2505 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2506 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2508 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2509 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2513 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2514 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2516 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2517 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2518 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2519 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2521 ** Changes in behavior
2523 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2524 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2525 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2529 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2530 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2531 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2534 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2538 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2539 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2540 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2542 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2543 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2545 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2546 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2547 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2548 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2549 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2551 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2552 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2553 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2554 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2555 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2556 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2557 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2558 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2560 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2561 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2563 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2564 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2566 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2567 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2569 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2570 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2571 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2573 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2574 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2575 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2576 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2578 ** Changes in behavior
2580 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2581 when -v or -c specified.
2583 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2584 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2588 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2589 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2590 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2591 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2592 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2594 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2595 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2596 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2598 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2599 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2600 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2601 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2602 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2603 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2604 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2606 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2607 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2608 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2612 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2613 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2615 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2618 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2619 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2621 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2622 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2624 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2625 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2627 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2629 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2633 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2634 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2636 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2639 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2643 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2644 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2646 ** Changes in behavior
2648 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2649 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2650 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2651 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2652 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2653 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2654 resolved for 2.6.39.
2655 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2656 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2657 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2661 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2664 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2668 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2669 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2670 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2672 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2673 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2674 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2676 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2677 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2678 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2680 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2681 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2683 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2684 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2686 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2687 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2689 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2690 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2694 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2695 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2696 processed portion thereof.
2698 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2699 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2701 ** Changes in behavior
2703 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2704 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2705 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2707 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2708 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2709 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2711 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2712 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2714 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2715 Use --preserve-context instead.
2717 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2720 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2724 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2725 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2726 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2727 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2728 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2730 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2731 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2733 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2734 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2735 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2737 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2738 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2740 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2741 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2745 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2746 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2747 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2748 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2749 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2750 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2751 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2752 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2754 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2755 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2756 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2758 ** Changes in behavior
2760 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2761 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2762 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2765 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2769 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2770 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2771 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2774 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2778 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2779 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2781 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2782 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2784 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2785 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2787 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2788 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2789 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2790 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2792 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2793 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2795 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2796 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2797 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2799 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2801 ** Changes in behavior
2803 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2804 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2805 to the number of available processors.
2809 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2810 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2811 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2814 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2818 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2819 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2820 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2821 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2823 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2824 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2825 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2827 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2828 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2830 ** Changes in behavior
2832 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2833 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2835 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2836 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2837 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2838 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2839 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2840 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2842 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2843 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2844 the same way as the others.
2846 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2847 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2850 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2854 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2855 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2856 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2858 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2859 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2861 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2862 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2863 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2865 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2866 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2868 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2869 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2871 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2872 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2873 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2875 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2876 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2877 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2878 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2882 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2883 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2885 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2888 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2889 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2891 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2893 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2894 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2895 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2897 ** Changes in behavior
2899 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2900 rather than its aliased target.
2902 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2903 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2904 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2906 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2907 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2908 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2909 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2910 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2911 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2912 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2913 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2915 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2917 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2919 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2920 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2923 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2924 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2925 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2926 control like taskset for example.
2928 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2930 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2931 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2932 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2933 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2934 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2935 includes %C when context information is available.
2937 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2938 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2939 rather than a file system attribute.
2941 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2942 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2943 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2944 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2946 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2947 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2948 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2950 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2951 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2952 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2955 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2959 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2960 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2962 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2964 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2965 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2967 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2968 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2969 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2970 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2972 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2973 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2974 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2978 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2979 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2981 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2982 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2983 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2985 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2986 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2987 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2988 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2989 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2990 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2991 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2992 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2993 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2995 ** Changes in behavior
2997 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2998 sequence when it would be a no-op.
3000 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
3001 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
3004 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
3008 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
3009 of available processors, which may not have been the case
3010 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
3011 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3015 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
3016 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
3018 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
3019 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
3020 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
3021 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
3023 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
3024 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
3025 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
3028 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
3032 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
3033 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
3034 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
3036 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
3037 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
3038 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
3040 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
3041 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3043 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
3044 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
3045 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
3046 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3048 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
3049 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
3050 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3052 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
3053 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
3054 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
3055 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3057 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
3058 renamed-aside and then recreated.
3059 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3061 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
3062 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
3063 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
3064 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3066 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
3067 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
3068 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3070 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
3071 processes will not intersperse their output.
3072 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
3075 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
3079 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
3080 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3082 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
3083 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3085 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
3086 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
3087 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
3088 the presence of the empty string argument.
3089 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3091 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
3092 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
3093 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
3094 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3096 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
3097 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3099 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
3100 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
3101 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3103 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
3104 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
3105 and with a malicious user on the same system
3106 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
3107 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
3110 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
3114 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
3115 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
3116 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3118 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
3119 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
3120 offending directory and all "contents."
3122 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
3123 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
3124 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
3126 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
3127 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
3128 without capabilities were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3130 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
3131 processes will not intersperse their output.
3132 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3133 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3135 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
3136 output the name of the file to stdout.
3137 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3139 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
3140 call fails with errno == EACCES.
3141 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3143 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
3144 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
3147 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
3148 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
3149 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
3151 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
3152 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
3153 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
3154 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
3155 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
3156 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3158 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
3159 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
3160 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
3161 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
3163 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
3164 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
3166 ** Changes in behavior
3168 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
3169 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
3170 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
3171 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
3172 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
3174 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
3175 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
3176 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
3177 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
3179 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
3181 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
3182 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
3183 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
3184 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
3185 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
3189 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
3193 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
3194 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
3196 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
3197 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3199 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3200 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3201 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3203 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3204 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3207 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3211 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3212 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3213 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3215 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3216 to accommodate leap seconds.
3217 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3219 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3220 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3221 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3223 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3225 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3226 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3227 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3229 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3230 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3231 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3232 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3233 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3237 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3238 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3239 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3240 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3242 ** Changes in behavior
3244 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3245 environment variable is set.
3247 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3248 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3249 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3253 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3254 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3255 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3256 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3258 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3259 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3260 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3261 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3265 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3266 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3267 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3269 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3270 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3271 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3272 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3273 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3274 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3275 another improvement:
3277 rm -r is now slightly more standard-conforming when operating on
3278 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3281 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3285 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3286 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3287 and libraries tested at configure time.
3288 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3290 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3291 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3293 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3294 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3296 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3297 printing a summary to stderr.
3298 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3300 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3301 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3302 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3304 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3305 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3307 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3308 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3309 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3310 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3312 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3313 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3314 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3315 which is relatively unusual.
3316 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3318 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3319 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3320 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3321 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3322 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3323 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3324 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3328 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3329 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3330 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3331 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3332 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3336 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3337 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3339 ** Changes in behavior
3341 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3342 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3343 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3344 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3345 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3348 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3352 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3353 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3355 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3356 before data copying has started.
3358 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3359 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3361 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3362 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3363 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3364 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3366 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3367 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3368 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3369 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3371 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3376 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3377 for its standard streams.
3379 ** Changes in behavior
3381 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3382 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3383 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3384 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3385 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3386 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3388 ** Deprecated options
3390 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3391 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3395 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3397 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3398 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3399 a btrfs file system.
3401 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3403 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3404 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3406 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3407 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3410 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3414 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3415 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3416 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3417 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3419 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3420 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3421 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3422 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3423 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3428 make check: two tests have been corrected
3432 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3433 inherited from gnulib.
3436 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3440 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3441 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3442 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3443 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3445 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3446 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3448 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3450 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3451 systems without xattr support.
3453 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3454 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3455 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3457 ** Changes in behavior
3459 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3460 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3461 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3462 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3464 ** Improved robustness
3466 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3467 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3468 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3469 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3470 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3471 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3472 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3473 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3474 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3478 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3479 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3481 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3482 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3483 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3484 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3485 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3488 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3492 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3493 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3494 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3498 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3499 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3500 data was read, or on process exit.
3501 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3503 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3504 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3505 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3506 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3508 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3509 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3510 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3511 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3513 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3514 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3516 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3517 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3519 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3520 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3521 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3523 ** Changes in behavior
3525 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3526 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3527 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3529 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3530 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3532 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3533 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3534 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3537 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3541 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3543 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3544 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3545 install: Never copies xattrs
3547 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3548 from overwriting any existing destination file
3550 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3551 mode where this feature is available.
3553 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3554 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3555 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3556 do not modify the destination at all.
3558 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3560 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3564 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3565 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3567 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3569 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3570 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3572 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3573 processing the first file name
3575 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3576 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3577 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3578 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3580 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3581 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3583 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3584 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3587 ** Changes in behavior
3589 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3590 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3592 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3593 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3594 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3596 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3597 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3599 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3601 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3602 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3603 is still marked with a '+'.
3606 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3610 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3611 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3615 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3616 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3617 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3618 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3619 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3620 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3622 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3623 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3625 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3626 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3628 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3630 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3631 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3632 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3634 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3635 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3637 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3638 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3639 used to factor large numbers.
3641 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3644 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3646 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3648 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3649 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3651 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3652 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3653 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3654 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3656 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3657 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3658 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3660 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3661 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3665 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3667 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3668 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3670 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3671 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3673 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3675 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3676 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3680 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3681 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3682 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3684 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3686 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3687 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3688 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3690 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3691 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3692 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3694 ** Changes in behavior
3696 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3697 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3700 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3704 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3705 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3706 'futimens' system calls.
3710 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3712 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3713 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3714 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3716 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3717 with no USERNAME argument.
3719 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3720 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3721 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3723 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3724 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3725 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3726 number of fields for some inputs.
3728 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3729 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3731 ** Changes in behavior
3733 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3734 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3737 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3741 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3743 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3744 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3745 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3746 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3748 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3749 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3751 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3752 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3754 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3755 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3757 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3758 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3759 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3760 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3762 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3763 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3764 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3765 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3766 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3767 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3769 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3770 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3772 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3773 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3774 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3776 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3777 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3779 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3780 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3782 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3783 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3784 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3785 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3787 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3788 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3790 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3791 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3793 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3794 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3795 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3799 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3800 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3802 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3803 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3804 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3805 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3809 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3810 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3812 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3814 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3818 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3819 which have negative errno values.
3823 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3827 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3831 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3832 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3835 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3839 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3840 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3841 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3843 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3844 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3845 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3846 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3850 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3851 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3852 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3853 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3856 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3860 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3862 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3863 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3864 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3867 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3871 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3872 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3874 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3876 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3878 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3880 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3884 ** Changes in behavior
3886 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3887 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3889 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3890 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3892 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3893 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3894 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3898 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3899 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3900 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3901 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3902 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3903 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3904 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3905 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3906 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3907 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3908 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3910 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3911 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3912 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3915 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3918 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3919 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3920 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3922 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3923 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3924 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3927 ** New build options
3929 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3930 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3931 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3932 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3934 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3935 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3936 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3937 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3938 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3939 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3940 of "make check" fail.
3942 ** Remove deprecated options
3944 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3945 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3946 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3947 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3948 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3950 ** Improved robustness
3952 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3953 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3954 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3955 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3956 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3957 loss of the contents of a/f.
3959 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3960 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3964 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3965 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3966 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3968 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3969 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3970 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3971 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3973 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3974 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3975 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3976 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3977 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3978 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3979 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3980 destination is a symlink.
3982 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3984 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3985 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3987 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3988 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3990 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3992 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3993 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3995 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3996 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3998 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
4001 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
4002 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
4004 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
4005 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
4007 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
4008 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
4009 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
4010 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4012 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
4013 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
4014 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4016 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
4017 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
4018 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
4020 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
4021 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
4022 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
4023 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
4025 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
4026 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
4027 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
4029 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
4030 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
4032 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
4033 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
4035 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
4037 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
4038 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
4039 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
4041 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
4042 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
4044 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
4045 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
4047 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
4048 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
4050 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
4051 [present in the original version]
4054 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
4058 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
4060 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
4061 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
4062 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
4064 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
4065 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
4067 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
4071 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
4072 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
4074 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
4075 support but with insufficient /proc support.
4077 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
4078 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
4080 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
4081 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
4082 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
4083 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
4084 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
4085 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
4087 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
4088 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
4091 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
4092 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
4094 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
4097 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
4098 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
4099 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
4101 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
4102 directory is unreadable.
4104 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
4105 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
4106 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
4108 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
4109 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
4110 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
4111 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
4112 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
4115 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
4116 Before it would print nothing.
4118 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
4120 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
4121 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
4122 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
4123 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
4124 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
4125 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
4126 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
4127 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
4129 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
4133 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
4134 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
4135 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
4137 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
4138 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
4139 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
4140 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
4143 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
4147 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
4148 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
4149 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
4150 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
4151 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
4152 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
4153 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4155 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
4156 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
4157 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
4158 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
4159 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
4160 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
4161 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
4162 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4164 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
4165 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
4166 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
4169 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
4173 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
4174 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
4176 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
4177 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
4178 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
4180 ** Improved robustness
4182 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
4183 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
4184 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
4187 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
4191 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
4192 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
4193 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
4194 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
4195 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4197 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4201 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4204 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4208 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4209 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4210 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4211 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4213 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4214 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4216 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4217 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4218 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4221 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4223 ** Improved robustness
4225 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4226 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4228 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4229 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4230 or NFS-mounted partition.
4232 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4233 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4237 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4238 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4239 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4240 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4241 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4242 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4244 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4245 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4247 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4248 or neglect to report file removal.
4250 For the "groups" command:
4252 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4253 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4255 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4257 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4259 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4263 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4264 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4267 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4269 ** Changes in behavior
4271 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4272 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4273 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4274 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4276 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4277 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4278 a final './' or '../' component.
4280 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4281 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4282 this only for pipes.
4284 ** Infrastructure changes
4286 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4287 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4288 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4289 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4293 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4294 name is "." or "..".
4296 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4297 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4298 dirent.d_type support.
4300 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4301 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4303 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4304 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4305 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4306 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4309 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4311 ** Changes in behavior
4313 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4317 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4318 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4322 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4323 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4324 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4326 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4327 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4329 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4330 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4332 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4334 ** Improved robustness
4336 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4337 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4338 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4340 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4341 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4344 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4345 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4347 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4348 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4350 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4351 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4353 ** Changes in behavior
4355 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4356 where the two are distinct.
4358 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4359 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4360 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4361 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4362 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4363 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4364 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4365 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4366 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4367 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4368 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4369 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4370 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4371 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4372 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4373 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4374 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4376 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4377 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4378 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4380 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4381 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4382 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4383 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4386 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4387 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4391 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4392 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4393 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4394 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4396 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4397 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4398 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4400 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4401 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4402 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4403 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4404 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4407 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4408 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4410 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4411 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4412 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4413 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4415 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4416 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4417 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4419 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4420 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4421 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4422 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4424 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4425 and sticky) with the -m option.
4427 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4428 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4429 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4430 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4431 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4433 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4434 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4436 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4440 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4441 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4442 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4443 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4445 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4447 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4449 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4450 silently ignoring one of them.
4452 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4453 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4454 containing this change was 5.92.
4456 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4457 automatically newline terminated.
4459 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4460 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4461 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4462 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4465 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4466 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4467 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4470 ** Scheduled for removal
4472 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4473 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4475 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4476 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4477 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4478 command to unlink a directory.
4480 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4481 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4482 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4483 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4487 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4488 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4489 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4490 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4491 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4492 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4496 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4497 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4499 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4501 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4502 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4503 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4505 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4506 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4509 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4510 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4512 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4513 list directories before files.
4515 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4516 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4517 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4518 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4521 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4523 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4525 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4526 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4527 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4529 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4530 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4534 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4535 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4536 usually printing nothing.
4538 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4540 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4541 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4542 them with hard-linked directories.
4544 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4545 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4546 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4548 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4549 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4550 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4552 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4555 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4556 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4558 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4559 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4561 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4562 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4564 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4565 all command-line arguments.
4567 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4569 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4571 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4572 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4574 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4576 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4577 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4578 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4579 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4580 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4582 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4583 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4585 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4586 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4587 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4588 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4590 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4592 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4596 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4597 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4599 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4600 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4602 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4603 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4605 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4606 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4608 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4609 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4611 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4613 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4614 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4615 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4618 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4620 ** Build-related bug fixes
4622 installing .mo files would fail
4625 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4629 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4631 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4634 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4638 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4639 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4643 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4645 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4646 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4648 ** Deprecated options
4650 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4651 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4653 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4657 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4659 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4660 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4661 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4662 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4664 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4667 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4673 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4678 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4680 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4682 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4683 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4684 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4686 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4687 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4688 problematic usages. These include:
4690 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4691 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4692 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4693 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4694 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4695 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4696 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4697 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4698 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4700 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4701 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4703 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4704 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4705 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4706 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4708 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4709 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4710 between binary and text files.
4712 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4716 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4720 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4721 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4723 head tac tail tee tr
4724 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4726 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4727 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4729 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4730 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4731 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4733 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4735 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4737 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4738 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4739 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4743 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4745 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4746 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4748 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4749 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4750 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4754 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4755 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4759 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4760 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4761 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4765 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4766 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4770 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4772 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4774 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4778 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4779 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4780 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4782 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4783 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4784 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4785 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4786 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4788 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4792 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4793 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4794 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4796 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4798 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4799 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4800 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4801 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4803 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4805 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4806 rather than silently wrapping around.
4808 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4809 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4811 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4812 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4814 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4815 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4816 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4817 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4819 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4821 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4823 ** Improved robustness
4825 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4826 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4827 no matter how large the result.
4829 ** Improved portability
4831 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4832 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4834 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4836 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4837 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4838 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4840 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4841 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4845 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4846 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4848 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4850 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4851 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4852 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4853 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4855 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4856 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4858 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4859 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4860 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4862 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4864 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4865 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4867 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4868 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4870 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4872 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4873 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4875 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4876 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4878 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4879 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4880 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4882 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4884 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4886 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4890 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4892 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4893 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4894 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4896 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4897 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4899 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4900 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4901 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4903 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4904 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4906 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4907 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4908 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4909 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4911 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4912 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4914 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4915 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4916 the file system does not support it.
4918 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4920 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4921 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4923 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4925 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4926 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4928 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4929 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4930 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4931 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4933 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4934 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4937 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4938 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4939 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4940 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4942 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4943 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4944 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4945 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4947 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4948 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4950 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4952 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4953 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4954 reporting incorrect results.
4958 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4959 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4961 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4964 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4966 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4967 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4969 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4970 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4972 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4975 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4976 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4977 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4978 the file name does not look like a page range.
4980 printf has several changes:
4982 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4983 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4985 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4986 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4987 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4989 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4990 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4993 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4994 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4996 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4997 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4999 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
5001 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
5002 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
5004 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
5006 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
5008 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
5009 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
5010 when first encountering the directory.
5014 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
5015 output; POSIX requires this.
5017 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
5018 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
5020 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
5022 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
5023 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
5025 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
5026 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
5028 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
5029 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
5030 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
5031 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
5032 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
5033 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
5034 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
5036 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
5037 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
5038 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
5040 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
5041 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
5043 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
5045 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
5047 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
5048 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
5049 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
5050 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
5052 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
5056 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
5057 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
5058 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
5059 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
5060 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
5062 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
5063 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
5064 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
5066 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
5067 is longer than PATH_MAX.
5069 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
5070 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
5072 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
5073 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
5074 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
5075 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
5076 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
5078 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
5079 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
5081 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
5082 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
5084 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
5086 nocreat do not create the output file
5087 excl fail if the output file already exists
5088 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
5089 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
5091 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
5093 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
5094 direct use direct I/O for data
5095 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
5096 sync likewise, but also for metadata
5097 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
5098 nofollow do not follow symlinks
5099 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
5101 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
5103 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
5104 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
5107 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
5108 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
5109 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
5110 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
5111 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
5112 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
5114 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
5115 list of NUL-terminated file names.
5117 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
5120 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
5122 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
5124 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
5125 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
5127 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
5128 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
5129 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
5131 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
5132 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
5133 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
5135 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
5137 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
5138 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
5140 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
5141 for compatibility with bash.
5143 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
5145 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
5146 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
5147 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
5148 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
5150 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
5151 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
5153 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
5154 ls supports TABSIZE.
5155 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
5156 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
5157 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
5159 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
5162 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
5164 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
5165 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
5166 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
5167 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
5168 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
5169 an offset, not as a file name.
5171 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
5172 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
5174 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
5175 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
5177 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
5178 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
5180 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
5181 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
5182 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
5184 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
5185 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
5187 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
5188 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
5192 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
5194 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
5196 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5200 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5201 or more arguments between partitions.
5203 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5204 holes in the destination.
5206 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5207 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5208 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5209 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5210 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5211 terminates immediately.
5213 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5215 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5217 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5218 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5219 not the empty string.
5221 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5222 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5226 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5227 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5228 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5231 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5238 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5242 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5243 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5245 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5246 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5248 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5249 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5250 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5253 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5257 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5258 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5260 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5261 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5263 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5264 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5265 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5267 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5269 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5272 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5274 ** Configuration option
5276 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5277 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5281 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5282 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5286 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5287 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5288 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5291 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5292 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5293 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5294 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5295 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5296 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5297 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5300 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5304 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5305 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5306 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5308 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5309 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5311 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5313 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5314 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5315 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5316 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5318 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5320 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5321 not just the ones that reference directories
5323 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5324 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5326 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5327 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5328 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5330 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5331 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5332 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5333 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5334 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5335 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5337 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5342 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5343 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5345 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5347 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5349 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5351 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5352 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5354 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5355 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5357 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5359 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5363 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5365 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5367 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5368 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5369 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5370 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5371 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5373 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5374 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5376 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5377 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5379 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5380 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5382 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5383 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5384 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5388 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5389 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5390 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5391 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5392 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5393 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5394 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5395 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5396 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5397 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5398 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5399 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5400 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5401 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5403 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5405 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5406 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5408 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5410 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5412 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5413 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5415 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5417 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5418 without a trailing newline.
5420 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5421 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5423 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5426 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5430 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5432 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5434 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5435 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5436 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5437 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5439 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5441 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5442 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5443 be printed without leading spaces.
5445 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5446 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5451 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5452 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5453 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5455 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5457 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5458 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5460 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5461 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5463 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5464 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5466 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5468 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5470 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5472 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5473 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5475 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5477 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5479 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5480 byte offsets are specified.
5483 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5486 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5489 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5490 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5491 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5492 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5493 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5494 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5495 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5496 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5497 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5498 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5499 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5500 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5501 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5502 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5503 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5504 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5505 directory where M has write access.
5506 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5507 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5508 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5511 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5512 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5513 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5514 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5515 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5516 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5517 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5518 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5519 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5520 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5521 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5522 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5523 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5524 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5525 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5526 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5527 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5528 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5529 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5530 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5531 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5532 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5533 appeared one additional time.
5535 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5536 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5537 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5538 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5541 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5542 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5543 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5544 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5545 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5546 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5547 if there were more than 338.
5549 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5550 - false --help now exits nonzero
5553 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5554 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5555 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5556 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5559 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5560 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5561 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5562 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5563 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5566 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5567 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5568 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5569 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5570 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5571 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5572 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5575 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5576 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5577 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5578 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5579 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5580 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5582 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5583 under certain unusual conditions
5584 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5585 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5588 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5589 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5590 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5591 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5592 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5593 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5594 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5595 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5596 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5597 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5598 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5599 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5600 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5601 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5602 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5603 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5606 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5607 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5610 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5611 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5612 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5613 involving hard-linked directories
5614 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5615 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5616 character-special and block files
5619 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5620 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5621 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5622 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5623 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5624 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5625 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5626 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5627 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5629 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5630 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5631 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5632 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5633 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5634 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5635 specified on the command line.
5636 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5637 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5638 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5639 the first file untouched.
5640 * readlink: new program
5641 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5642 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5643 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5644 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5645 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5646 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5649 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5650 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5651 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5652 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5653 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5654 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5655 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5656 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5657 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5658 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5659 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5660 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5662 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5663 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5664 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5666 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5667 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5668 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5669 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5670 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5671 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5672 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5673 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5676 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5677 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5680 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5681 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5682 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5683 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5684 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5685 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5686 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5689 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5690 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5692 ========================================================================
5693 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5694 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5697 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5699 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5700 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5701 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5702 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5703 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5704 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5705 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5706 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5707 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5708 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5709 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5710 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5712 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5713 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5714 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5715 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5717 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5720 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5722 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5723 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5724 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5725 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5726 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5727 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5728 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5731 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5732 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5733 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5734 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5735 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5736 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5737 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5738 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5739 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5740 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5741 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5742 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5743 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5744 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5745 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5746 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5748 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5749 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5751 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5752 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5753 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5754 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5755 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5756 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5758 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5759 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5760 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5761 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5762 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5763 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5764 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5766 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5767 the source files in the following example:
5768 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5769 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5770 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5771 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5772 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5773 links between source files with --preserve=links
5774 * cp accepts new options:
5775 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5776 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5777 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5778 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5779 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5780 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5781 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5782 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5783 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5785 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5786 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5787 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5788 even though it's older than dest.
5789 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5790 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5791 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5792 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5793 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5795 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5796 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5797 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5798 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5799 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5800 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5801 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5803 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5804 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5805 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5807 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5808 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5809 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5810 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5811 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5812 This is the default.
5814 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5815 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5816 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5817 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5818 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5820 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5823 ========================================================================
5824 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5825 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5828 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5829 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5831 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5832 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5833 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5834 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5835 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5837 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5838 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5839 that specifies a non-directory
5842 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5843 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5844 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5845 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5846 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5847 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5848 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5849 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5850 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5851 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5852 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5853 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5854 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5855 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5856 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5857 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5858 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5859 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5860 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5861 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5862 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5863 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5864 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5865 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5867 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5868 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5869 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5871 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5873 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5874 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5876 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5877 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5878 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5879 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5880 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5882 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5883 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5884 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5885 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5886 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5888 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5890 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5891 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5892 * still more portability fixes
5893 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5894 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5896 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5898 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5900 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5902 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5903 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5904 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5905 there is any time remaining
5906 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5908 ========================================================================
5909 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5910 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5912 This package began as the union of the following:
5913 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5915 ========================================================================
5917 Copyright (C) 2001-2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5919 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5920 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5921 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5922 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5923 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5924 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.