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NEWS
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GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
* Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
** Bug fixes
shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
** New commands
base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
** Changes in behavior
base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
** Improvements
du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
upon detection of a directory cycle.
[issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
** Bug fixes
dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
depending on the implicit chdir("/").
[bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
/proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
[bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
[bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
[bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
character at the 4GiB position.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
replaced before inotify watches were created.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
[bug introduced in the beginning]
tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
when those files are being created or renamed.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
** New features
chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
on stderr approximately every second.
numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
other than the default newline character.
stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
a useful setting with high latency links.
sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
--file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
and output errors in general.
** Changes in behavior
df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
suppress duplicate remote file systems.
[suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
** Improvements
cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
documentation are provided.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
** Bug fixes
chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
[bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendent.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
when reading the SELinux context for a file.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
[bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
[bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
values are in octal.
A W E
041 117 132
133 112 255
135 132 275
136 137 232
174 152 117
176 241 137
313 232 152
325 255 112
345 275 241
[These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
[These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
them being considered "dummy" mounts.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
seek pointer is not at the beginning.
[bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
[bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
[bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
[bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
[bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
[bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
[bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
** New features
od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
it suitable for embedded system.
** Changes in behavior
chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
will result in the delayed output of lines.
ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
and not output colors even with --colors=always.
** Improvements
chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
--format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
** Bug fixes
df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
permissions.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
[This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
[Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
[bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
from the source, when copying across file systems.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
[Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
[Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
[The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
[This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
[This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
** New features
cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
used to identify the split points.
df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
command line argument through to the output.
du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
of the blocks used.
id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
a NUL instead of a white space character.
id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
unique groups with empty lines.
shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
the output.
** Changes in behavior
cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
not just the transfer counts.
df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
as per the documented interface.
** Improvements
base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
get better performance through using more system specific logic.
sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
(for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
** Build-related
factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
** New programs
numfmt: reformat numbers
** New features
df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminite amount of time.
** Bug fixes
cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
"2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
[bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
[bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
[bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
** Changes in behavior
df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
'total' in the target column.
df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
** Improvements
readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
-z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
** Build-related
Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
for a patched distribution package.
factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
** New features
dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
sha384sum and sha512sum.
** Bug fixes
cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
eventually exits nonzero.
factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
"Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
Before, this would infloop:
b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
** Changes in behavior
nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
** Improvements
factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
probabilistic test.
seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
format-changing options.
stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
** Build-related
root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
$NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
are run without following the instructions in README.
We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
** Bug fixes
df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
For example, this command would fail to print "1":
(yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
sort -u could read freed memory.
For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
** New features
rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
** Bug fixes
cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
processes will not intersperse their output.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
date: invalid date '\260'
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
lines output by df, can work reliably.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
[This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
[df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
[you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
** New features
stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
** Changes in behavior
su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
have any reason to include it here.
** Improvements
sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
rather than after potentially expensive processing.
sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
[The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
** Bug fixes
id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
[bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
** New features
split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
** Changes in behavior
cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
** New features
As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
'-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
which changes the start number from the default of 0.
split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
additional static suffix to output file names.
basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
-z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
-z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
** Bug fixes
du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
typically still point to one of the hard links.
"mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
--relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
** Improvements
ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
instead of causing a usage failure.
split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
** New programs
realpath: print resolved file names.
** Bug fixes
du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
--block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
[bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
[bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
(on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
[bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
[you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
** Changes in behavior
df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
usually-short referent instead.
tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
** Bug fixes
ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
[bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
** Improvements
md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
** Changes in behavior
timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
** Build-related