In particular, I am doing this to fix the build under macppc. 6.12 is
just broken on machines that have a 64-bit time_t with a 32-bit long.
All of our local patches seem to have been assimilated upstream... but,
of course, this does not mean new problems won't arise!
This update has been tested on amd64, macppc and OS X 10.6.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
** Bug fixes
chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
[bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
[This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
[this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
[bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
[bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
[bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
** Changes in behavior
chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
when -v or -c specified.
cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
** New features
date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
"2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
receive signals initiated from the terminal.
** Improvements
cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
in gnulib.
df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
** Build-related
Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
** Bug fixes
tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
** Changes in behavior
cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
- it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
- a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
resolved for 2.6.39.
- it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
** Portability
dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
** Bug fixes
cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
** New features
dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
processed portion thereof.
dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
** Changes in behavior
cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
[The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
Use --preserve-context instead.
test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
** Bug fixes
du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
reject file names invalid for that file system.
uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
** New features
cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
the same number of fields are output for each line.
** Changes in behavior
join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
** Bug fixes
split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
** Bug fixes
cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
(spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
** Changes in behavior
sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
to the number of available processors.
** New features
split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
** Bug fixes
cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
[the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
** Changes in behavior
cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
Likewise for %Y and %Z.
stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
the same way as the others.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
** Bug fixes
du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
"NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
[bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
[bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
[bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
** New features
cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
with FreeBSD.
sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
** Changes in behavior
df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
rather than its aliased target.
du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
[The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
zeros to be equal.
sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
limited with the --parallel option or with external process
control like taskset for example.
stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
includes %C when context information is available.
stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
rather than a file system attribute.
stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
%Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
%x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
** Bug fixes
cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
[bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
** New features
join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
duration after the initial signal was sent.
who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
** Changes in behavior
ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
sequence when it would be a no-op.
join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
** Bug fixes
nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
of available processors, which may not have been the case
on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
** Build-related
Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
glibc <wchar.h> headers.
Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
** Bug fixes
cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
[bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
[bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
renamed-aside and then recreated.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
processes will not intersperse their output.
[the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
** Bug fixes
id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
the presence of the empty string argument.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
and with a malicious user on the same system
was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
** Bug fixes
chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
Even then, chcon may still be useful.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
offending directory and all "contents."
env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
processes will not intersperse their output.
This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
output the name of the file to stdout.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
call fails with errno == EACCES.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
message to stderr.
stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
[The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
[The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
** Changes in behavior
chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
fails with status 125 instead of 127.
du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
** New programs
nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
** New features
env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
"mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
** Bug fixes
cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
when the source file doesn't have write access.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
to accommodate leap seconds.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
"ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
[The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
** Portability
On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
directory or a symlink to a directory.
** Changes in behavior
id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
environment variable is set.
readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
since mkdir will succeed in that case.
** New features
ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
"./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
** Improvements
rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
another improvement:
rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
* Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
** Bug fixes
cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
and libraries tested at configure time.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
printing a summary to stderr.
[bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
[the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
which is relatively unusual.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
(i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
** Portability
ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
** New features
cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
** Changes in behavior
tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
* Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
** Bug fixes
dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
before data copying has started.
install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
[introduced in coreutils-7.0]
ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
[introduced in coreutils-7.0]
sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
[This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
some locales.
** New programs
stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
for its standard streams.
** Changes in behavior
ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
** Deprecated options
nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
** New features
chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
a btrfs file system.
cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
* Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
** Bug fixes
date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
[This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
submodule is dirty.
** Build-related
make check: two tests have been corrected
** Portability
There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
inherited from gnulib.
* Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
** Bug fixes
cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
--preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
names from the locale database that have differing widths.
ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
systems without xattr support.
sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
[introduced in coreutils-7.2]
** Changes in behavior
shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
** Improved robustness
cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
[the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
** Portability
df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
`id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
[truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
[infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
* Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
** New features
pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
** Bug fixes
cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
data was read, or on process exit.
[bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
[bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
** Changes in behavior
cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
* Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
** New features
Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
and XFS.
cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
install: Never copies xattrs
cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
from overwriting any existing destination file
dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
mode where this feature is available.
install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
do not modify the destination at all.
ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
** Bug fixes
chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
cp uses much less memory in some situations
cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
processing the first file name
seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
to be small enough.
** Changes in behavior
cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
--dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
is still marked with a '+'.
* Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
** New programs
timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
** New features
chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
arguments after all arguments have been processed.
If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
used to factor large numbers.
install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
strip binaries.
ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
maximum command-line (argv) length.
sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
** Bug fixes
chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
** Improvements
Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
** Changes in behavior
stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
