----------------------------------------------------------------
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
** Bug fixes
'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
after asking the user whether to proceed.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
[bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
an "error truncating" diagnostic.
[bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
(for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
[bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
** Changes in behavior
cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
end-of-options marker.
nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
parameters follow.
'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
marker as before: 'a -- b'.
echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
environment variable is set.
When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
** New features
id now supports specifying multiple users.
'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
'--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
signal handling before executing a program.
** New commands
basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
** Improvements
ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
which is common in Asian locales.
stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
----------------------------------------------------------------
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
** Bug fixes
'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
[bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
[bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
[bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
even if it can't be traversed.
[bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, ‘mv -n A A’
now silently does nothing if A exists.
[bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
** Changes in behavior
'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
it is self referential.
ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
** New features
cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
each processing step.
env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
(shebang lines).
md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
** Improvements
cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
and tail -f uses inotify.
wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
which is especially significant on macOS.
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