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authorDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-19 16:58:41 +0000
committerDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-19 16:58:41 +0000
commite1908ae95dd4c9d19ee4dfabfc8bf8a7f85943fe (patch)
treef5cc731bedcac0fb7fe14d952e4581e749f8bb87 /NEWS
parentInitial commit. (diff)
downloadcoreutils-e1908ae95dd4c9d19ee4dfabfc8bf8a7f85943fe.tar.xz
coreutils-e1908ae95dd4c9d19ee4dfabfc8bf8a7f85943fe.zip
Adding upstream version 9.4.upstream/9.4upstream
Signed-off-by: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>
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+GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 9.4 (2023-08-29) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
+ fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
+ presented with malformed checksum lines.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
+
+ 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
+ Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
+
+ 'cp --sparse=never' will avoid copy-on-write (reflinking) and copy offloading,
+ to ensure no holes present in the destination copy.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
+
+ cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
+
+ 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
+ are escaped appropriately in the status output.
+ This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
+
+ dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
+ Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
+
+ factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
+ Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
+ Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
+ platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
+ Also see the new --enable-systemd option mentioned below.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
+
+ 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ shred again operates on Solaris when built for 64 bits.
+ Previously it would have exited with a "getrandom: Invalid argument" error.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
+
+ tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
+ erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD,
+ and is being built again on FreeBSD and Haiku.
+ [bugs introduced in coreutils-9.2]
+
+ 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
+ on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
+ due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
+ I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
+
+ 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
+ short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
+ checksum utilities with cksum.
+
+ 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
+ Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
+ where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
+ Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
+ Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
+ [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
+
+** Improvements
+
+ cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
+ irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
+ reinstating that behavior from coreutils-9.0.
+
+ comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
+ write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
+
+ split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
+ This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
+
+ split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
+
+ tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
+
+ 'who -a' now displays the boot time on Alpine Linux, OpenBSD,
+ Cygwin, Haiku, and some Android distributions
+
+ 'uptime' now succeeds on some Android distributions, and now counts
+ VM saved/sleep time on GNU (Linux, Hurd, kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD,
+ Minix, and Cygwin.
+
+ On GNU/Linux platforms where utmp-format files have 32-bit timestamps,
+ pinky, uptime, and who can now work for times after the year 2038,
+ so long as systemd is installed, you configure with a new, experimental
+ option --enable-systemd, and you use the programs without file arguments.
+ (For example, with systemd 'who /var/log/wtmp' does not work because
+ systemd does not support the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp.)
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
+ will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
+ Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
+ more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
+
+ cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
+ Previously it may have issued "File exists" errors when
+ it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
+
+ date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
+ Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
+ Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
+ This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
+
+ wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
+ Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
+
+ Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
+ on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
+ build procedure now rejects these configurations.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
+ to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
+ Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
+ due to -n, -i, or -u.
+
+** New features
+
+ cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
+ in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
+ This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
+ line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
+ the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
+ total line in this case.
+ [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
+
+ 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
+ symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
+
+ 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
+
+ cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
+ triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
+ which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
+
+ cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
+ when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
+ file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
+ Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
+ which may have resulted in data corruption.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
+
+ cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
+ falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
+ [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
+
+ 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
+
+ rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
+ Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
+ E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
+ [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
+
+ runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
+ so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
+ [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
+
+ 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
+ like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
+ Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
+ long been documented to be platform-dependent.
+ [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
+
+ stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
+ invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
+ Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
+ and the system supported set of valid speeds.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
+ Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
+
+ tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
+ exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
+ [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
+
+ 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
+ on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
+ sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
+ corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
+ along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
+ In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
+ in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
+ the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
+
+ 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
+ empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
+
+ 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
+ action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
+ 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
+ for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
+
+ cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
+ to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
+ [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
+
+ du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
+ symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
+ sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
+ could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
+
+ 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
+ reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
+ This behavior is now documented.
+
+ ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
+ if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
+
+ printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
+ unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
+ universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
+
+ runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
+ internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
+ from errors from the invoked command.
+
+ 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
+ multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
+ most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
+ less than N.
+
+ 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
+
+** New Features
+
+ cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
+ checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
+
+ cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
+ No file name or other information is output in this mode.
+
+ cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
+ print details on how a file is being copied.
+
+ factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
+ in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
+
+ ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
+ select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
+
+ mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
+ asked to move a file to a different file system.
+
+ split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
+ range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
+
+ split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
+ by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
+
+ wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
+ to give explicit control over when the total is output.
+
+** Improvements
+
+ cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
+ will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
+ This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
+ and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
+ for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
+
+ On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
+ Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
+
+ date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
+ specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
+
+ rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
+ when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
+ diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
+
+ tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
+ when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
+ Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
+
+ tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
+ exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
+
+ tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
+ telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
+ Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
+ and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
+ All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
+
+ If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
+ cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
+ before adjusting it to the correct value.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
+
+ 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
+ Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
+
+ On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
+ and B is in some other file system.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
+
+ On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
+ by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
+
+ 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
+ or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
+ for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
+ and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
+
+ On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
+ when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
+
+ 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
+ for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
+ simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
+ user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
+
+ chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
+ which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
+ causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
+ Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
+
+ cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
+ so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
+
+ date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
+ padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
+ clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
+
+ dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
+ and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
+
+ dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
+ For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
+ 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
+ seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
+ though they still work.
+
+ ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
+ capabilities are rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
+ about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
+
+ ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
+ before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
+
+ stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
+ behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
+ Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
+
+ timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
+ if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
+ when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
+ distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
+
+** New Features
+
+ dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
+ like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
+
+ dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
+ entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
+
+ dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
+ variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
+
+** Improvements
+
+ cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
+ This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
+
+ On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
+ are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
+ not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
+ 'cp -p', 'cp -a').
+
+ The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
+
+ With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
+ any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
+ since synchronizing can take a long time.
+
+ printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
+
+ sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
+ that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
+
+ 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
+
+ root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
+ now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
+ being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
+
+** Build-related
+
+ AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
+
+ cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
+ even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
+ is a non regular file.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
+
+ csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
+ when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
+ [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
+
+ df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
+
+ df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
+
+ du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
+ heavily changed during the run.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
+
+ env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
+
+ expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
+
+ ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstattable files.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
+
+ mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
+
+ nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
+ by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
+
+ rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
+ [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
+
+ split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
+ Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
+
+ tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
+ to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
+
+ tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
+ invalid combinations of case character classes.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
+
+ basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
+ on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
+ I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
+
+ cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
+ Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
+ files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
+
+ On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
+ directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
+ that was made in release 8.32.
+
+ ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
+ for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
+ instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
+
+ stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
+ This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
+
+ sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
+ This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
+
+** New Features
+
+ cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
+ of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
+ cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
+ will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
+
+ cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
+
+ cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
+ when verifying tagged format checksums.
+
+ expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
+
+ ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
+ to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
+
+ ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
+ This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
+
+ ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
+ NUL instead of newline.
+
+ nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
+
+ stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
+ %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
+ respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
+
+** Improvements
+
+ cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
+ literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
+
+ cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
+ and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
+ A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
+
+ md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
+ This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
+
+ df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
+ acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
+
+ rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
+ This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
+
+ stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
+ and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
+ type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
+
+ timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
+
+ wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
+ where avx2 instructions are supported.
+ A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
+ it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
+ [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
+
+ dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
+ when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
+ to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
+ reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
+ [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
+
+ df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
+ like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
+ when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
+ filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
+ [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
+ the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
+
+ factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
+ ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
+ and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
+ (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
+
+ rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
+ that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
+ was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
+
+ 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
+ [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
+
+ split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
+ when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
+ for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
+ seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
+ 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
+ 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
+ Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
+ on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
+ variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
+ and --parallel.
+
+ date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
+ "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
+ "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
+ "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
+ For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
+ Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
+ rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
+ [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
+ coreutils package.]
+
+ date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
+ if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
+ Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
+ and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
+
+ ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
+ Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
+ from an empty directory, with default ls options.
+
+ uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
+ and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
+
+** New Features
+
+ ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
+ file creation time, where available.
+
+ od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
+ file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
+
+ stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
+ to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
+ useful on network file systems.
+
+** Improvements
+
+ stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
+ operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
+
+ stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
+ "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
+ stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
+
+** Build-related
+
+ gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
+
+
+* 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.
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
+ [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
+
+ dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
+ and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
+ invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
+ and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
+
+ df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
+
+ ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
+ [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
+
+ shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
+ to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
+
+ stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
+ [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
+
+ tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
+ On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
+ timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
+ invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
+ this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
+ timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
+
+** New features
+
+ timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
+
+** Improvements
+
+ dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
+
+ tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
+ rather than reading from the start.
+
+ Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
+ and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
+ for unknown long options.
+
+** Build-related
+
+ Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
+ not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
+ Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
+ mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
+ [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
+
+ When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
+ races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
+ the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
+ later, the races are still present on other platforms.
+ [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
+
+ cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
+ backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
+ E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
+ now fails instead of losing the data.
+ [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
+
+ cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
+ For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
+ [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
+
+ date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
+ user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
+
+ dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
+ consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
+ df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
+ specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
+
+ df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
+ no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
+
+ `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
+ Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
+ [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
+
+ kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
+ Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
+ [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
+
+ ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
+ have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
+
+ split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
+
+ md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
+ ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
+
+ tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
+ [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
+
+ tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
+ Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
+ or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
+ [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
+
+ tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
+ non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
+ [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
+
+ uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
+ as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
+
+ expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
+ number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
+
+** New features
+
+ expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
+ by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
+ useful for visualizing diff output for example.
+
+ ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
+ format links to files, supported by some terminals.
+
+ split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
+ lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
+
+ env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
+ executing the subsidiary program.
+
+ expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
+ the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
+ responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
+ waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
+
+** Improvements
+
+ mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
+
+ stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
+ is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
+
+ tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
+ when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
+ is effective in this case.
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
+ as appropriate for the -a, --preserve=context, or -Z options.
+ [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
+
+ date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
+ not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
+
+ Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
+ when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
+ [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
+
+ factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
+ 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
+
+ tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
+ which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
+ [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
+
+ timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
+ The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
+ after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
+ to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
+ [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
+
+ wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
+ Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
+ depending on the size of the first file processed.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
+** Improvements
+
+ The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
+ The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
+ Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
+ option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
+
+ date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
+ and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
+ time zone is indeterminate.
+
+ nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
+ set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
+ set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
+ nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
+
+ stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
+ to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
+ file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
+
+ stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
+ ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
+
+ If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
+ 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
+ That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
+
+** New features
+
+ expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
+ after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
+ specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
+ handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
+ coreutils-8.24]
+
+ cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
+ directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
+
+ chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
+ using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
+ [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
+ introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
+ fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
+
+ date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
+ System V style platforms where this information is available only
+ in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
+ factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
+ head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
+ which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
+ install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
+ two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
+ defaults to a different SELinux context.
+
+ ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
+
+ md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
+ starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
+ [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
+
+ nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
+ Previously it would have output random data from memory.
+ [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
+
+ sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
+
+ stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
+ for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
+ stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
+ [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
+
+ seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
+
+ tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
+ by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
+ and is now handled correctly in all cases.
+ [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
+
+ tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
+ to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
+ file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
+
+ tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
+ Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
+
+ tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
+ only doing so if --retry is specified.
+ [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
+
+ yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
+
+ seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
+ values for any argument.
+
+ stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
+ they are out of localtime range.
+
+ sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
+ and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
+ The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
+ like '+2' must be treated as file names.
+
+** Improvements
+
+ dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
+ interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
+ The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
+
+ df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
+ mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
+
+ du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
+ when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
+
+ install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
+
+ ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
+ written to a terminal.
+
+ ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
+ and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
+
+ stat and tail now know about these file systems:
+ "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
+ "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
+ "daxfs" Optical media file system,
+ "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
+ "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
+ "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
+ "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
+ "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
+ stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
+ tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
+
+ stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
+ same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
+
+** New programs
+
+ b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
+ a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
+
+** New Features
+
+ comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
+
+ date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
+ display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
+
+ date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
+ and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
+ That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
+
+ cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
+
+ install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
+ are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
+
+ ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
+
+ mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
+ multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
+
+ shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
+
+ sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
+ that specify an offset for the first field.
+ [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
+
+ tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
+
+** New commands
+
+ base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
+ and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
+
+** New features
+
+ comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
+ tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
+
+ dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
+ E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
+ if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
+ Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
+ perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
+
+ md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
+ verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
+ This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
+
+ printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
+ is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
+ with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
+
+ stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
+ for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
+ thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
+
+ date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
+ The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
+
+ df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
+ eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
+
+ ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
+ when outputting to a terminal.
+
+ join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
+
+** Improvements
+
+ All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
+ which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
+
+ Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
+ more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
+
+ md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
+ by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
+ This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
+
+ dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
+ For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
+
+ du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
+ upon detection of a directory cycle.
+ [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
+
+ ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
+
+ stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
+ pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
+ and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
+
+ wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
+ by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
+
+
+* 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 descendant.
+ [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 unstattable
+ 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 indeterminate 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
+
+ "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
+ xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
+ only .tar.xz files is enough.
+
+
+* 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]
+
+ join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
+ at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
+ the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
+
+ 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 timestamps 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/-n option to generate a specific number of
+ files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
+ options to fine-tune the resulting output.
+
+
+* 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 timestamp 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.
+
+ stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
+ listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
+
+
+* 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 command 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 capabilities 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 preceding 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 standard-conforming 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 timestamp, 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 timestamps 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 noticeable 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 colors names of 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.
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
+
+** New features
+
+ cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
+ file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
+ 'futimens' system calls.
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
+
+ cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
+ "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
+ permissions from the some-fifo argument.
+
+ id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
+ with no USERNAME argument.
+
+ id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
+ Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
+ was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
+
+ uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
+ In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka &nbsp) is nonzero.
+ On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
+ number of fields for some inputs.
+
+ tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
+ "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
+ [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
+
+ "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
+ -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
+ with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
+ to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
+
+ dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
+ of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
+
+ id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
+ much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
+
+ ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
+ of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
+
+ md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
+ echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
+ sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
+
+ md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
+ and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
+ and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
+ Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
+ sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
+ [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
+
+ "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
+ mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
+
+ mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
+ when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
+
+ "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
+ stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
+
+ "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
+ [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
+
+ "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
+ the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
+ at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
+ --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
+
+ "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
+ prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
+
+ "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
+ in more cases when a directory is empty.
+
+ "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
+ rather than reporting the invalid string format.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
+
+** New features
+
+ join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
+ be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
+
+ sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
+ general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
+ options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
+ and --random-sort/-R, resp.
+
+** Improvements
+
+ id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
+ would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
+
+ ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
+
+ seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
+
+** Portability
+
+ rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
+ which have negative errno values.
+
+** Consistency
+
+ install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
+ not to stderr.
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
+ permissions of a just-created destination directory.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
+
+ tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
+ of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
+ env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
+
+** Improvements
+
+ "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
+ whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
+ Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
+ fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
+
+ "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
+ in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
+
+** New programs
+
+ arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
+ But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
+
+ chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
+
+ mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
+
+ runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
+
+** Programs no longer installed by default
+
+ hostname, su
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
+ Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
+
+ pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
+ the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
+
+ tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
+ The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
+ and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
+
+** New features
+
+ Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
+ * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
+ * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
+ Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
+ not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
+ similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
+ * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
+ * id accepts new "-Z" option.
+ * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
+ * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
+ * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
+
+ The following commands and options now support the standard size
+ suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
+ head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
+ tail -c, tail -n.
+
+ cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
+ is not possible.
+
+ uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
+ option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
+ NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
+
+ wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
+ This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
+ (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
+ error messages.
+
+** New build options
+
+ By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
+ To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
+ If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
+ ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
+
+ You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
+ at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
+ "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
+ Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
+ built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
+ and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
+ of "make check" fail.
+
+** Remove deprecated options
+
+ df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
+ du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
+ ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
+ ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
+ who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
+
+** Improved robustness
+
+ ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
+ In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
+ For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
+ should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
+ However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
+ loss of the contents of a/f.
+
+ stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
+ in its 35-colon command-line argument
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
+ with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
+ [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
+
+ cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
+ Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
+ reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
+ and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
+
+ cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
+ name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
+ no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
+ symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
+ or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
+ "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
+ nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
+ destination is a symlink.
+
+ "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
+
+ "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
+ too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
+
+ cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
+ before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
+
+ "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
+
+ cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
+ than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
+
+ date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
+ in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
+
+ du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
+ in the total size.
+
+ du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
+ directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
+
+ ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
+ first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
+
+ ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
+ a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
+ was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
+ [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
+
+ ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
+ ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
+ before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
+
+ od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
+ nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
+ with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
+
+ "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
+ the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
+ of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
+ od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
+
+ ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
+ no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
+ and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
+
+ seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
+ so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
+
+ seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
+ and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
+
+ "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
+
+ Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
+ "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
+ invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
+
+ sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
+ no longer provokes unaligned memory access
+
+ split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
+ [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
+
+ tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
+ complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
+
+ tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
+ [present in the original version]
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
+
+ The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
+ the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
+ is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
+
+ Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
+ no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
+ Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
+
+ chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
+ support but with insufficient /proc support.
+
+ "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
+ a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
+
+ "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
+ too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
+ directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
+ temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
+ users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
+ similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
+
+ cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
+ more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
+ in coreutils-5.3.0.
+
+ dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
+ operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
+
+ "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
+ coreutils-6.0.
+
+ A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
+ a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
+ "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
+
+ pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
+ directory is unreadable.
+
+ rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
+ when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
+ and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
+
+ rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
+ conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
+ directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
+ to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
+ with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
+ to remove it.
+
+ "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
+ Before it would print nothing.
+
+ "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
+
+ "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
+ remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
+ Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
+ "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
+ a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
+ $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
+ $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
+ mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
+ Now it prints this:
+ mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
+
+** New features
+
+ sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
+ program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
+ This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
+
+ sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
+ is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
+ --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
+ --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
+ were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
+ This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
+ To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
+ ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
+ with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
+ affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
+
+ cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
+ had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
+ copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
+ directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
+ Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
+ --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
+ or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
+ This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
+
+ du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
+ listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
+ coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
+
+
+* Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
+ nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
+
+ A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
+ made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
+ way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
+
+** Improved robustness
+
+ Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
+ trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
+ Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
+
+
+* Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
+ when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
+ openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
+ or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
+ openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
+
+ "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
+
+** New features
+
+ rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
+
+
+* Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
+ with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
+ --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
+ gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
+
+ cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
+ This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
+
+ With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
+ For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
+ successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
+
+
+* Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
+
+** Improved robustness
+
+ pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
+ buggy native getaddrinfo function.
+
+ rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
+ sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
+ or NFS-mounted partition.
+
+ sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
+ mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
+ inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
+ preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
+ it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
+ introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
+ in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
+
+ cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
+ action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
+
+ With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
+ or neglect to report file removal.
+
+ For the "groups" command:
+
+ "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
+ than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
+
+ "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
+
+ "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
+
+ shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
+
+** Portability
+
+ Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
+ compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
+
+
+* Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
+ process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
+ uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
+ means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
+
+ rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
+ now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
+ a final './' or '../' component.
+
+ tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
+ operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
+ this only for pipes.
+
+** Infrastructure changes
+
+ Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
+ If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
+ in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
+ infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
+ name is "." or "..".
+
+ "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
+ no differently than regular directories on a file system with
+ dirent.d_type support.
+
+ "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
+ suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
+
+ mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
+ where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
+ a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
+ now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
+
+
+* Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
+
+** New features
+
+ printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
+ implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
+ the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
+ [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
+
+ df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
+ [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
+
+ ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
+ [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
+
+* Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
+
+** Improved robustness
+
+ df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
+ report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
+ (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
+
+ dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
+ prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
+ and unexpand.
+
+ fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
+ (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
+
+ pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
+ where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
+
+ rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
+ hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
+
+** Changes in behavior
+
+ basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
+ where the two are distinct.
+
+ chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
+ set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
+ 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
+ set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
+ similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
+ clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
+ 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
+ in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
+ 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
+ systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
+ operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
+ cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
+ bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
+ 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
+ Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
+ 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
+ something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
+
+ 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
+ link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
+ This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
+
+ csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
+ Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
+ interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
+ . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
+ ? operators.
+
+ date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
+ the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
+
+ df changes:
+
+ df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
+ therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
+ systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
+ chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
+
+ df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
+ exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
+ whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
+
+ expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
+ (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
+ second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
+ errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
+ used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
+ now checks for).
+
+ install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
+ e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
+
+ install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
+ instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
+ not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
+ compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
+
+ ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
+ ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
+ successful and the output is easier to parse.
+
+ ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
+ However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
+ if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
+ attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
+
+ mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
+ and sticky) with the -m option.
+
+ nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
+ redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
+ nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
+ $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
+ response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
+
+ rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
+ default of using no argument still acts like -i.
+
+ rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
+
+ seq changes:
+
+ seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
+ information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
+ You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
+ for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
+
+ seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
+
+ seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
+
+ sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
+ silently ignoring one of them.
+
+ stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
+ FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
+ containing this change was 5.92.
+
+ stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
+ automatically newline terminated.
+
+ stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
+ via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
+ octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
+ two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
+ \v, \", \\).
+
+ With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
+ standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
+ Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
+ or socket.
+
+** Scheduled for removal
+
+ ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
+ now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
+
+ rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
+ option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
+ that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
+ command to unlink a directory.
+
+ Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
+ -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
+ would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
+ to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
+
+** New programs
+
+ base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
+ sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
+ sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
+ sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
+ sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
+ shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
+
+** New features
+
+ chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
+ as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
+
+ New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
+
+ 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
+ hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
+ later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
+
+ 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
+ time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
+ 2.6.8 and later).
+
+ 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
+ on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
+
+ ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
+ list directories before files.
+
+ rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
+ prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
+ files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
+ for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
+ against mistakes.
+
+ shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
+
+ sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
+
+ sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
+ POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
+ 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
+
+ wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
+ list of NUL-terminated file names.
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
+ file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
+ usually printing nothing.
+
+ cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
+
+ When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
+ hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
+ them with hard-linked directories.
+
+ fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
+ a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
+ inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
+
+ fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
+ a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
+ misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
+
+ ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
+ unnecessarily.
+
+ ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
+ rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
+
+ mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
+ now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
+
+ mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
+ now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
+
+ rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
+ all command-line arguments.
+
+ rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
+
+ rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
+
+ rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
+ a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
+
+ shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
+
+ sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
+ mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
+ function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
+ on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
+ SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
+
+ tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
+ attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
+
+* Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
+* Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
+* Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
+* Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
+
+[see the b5_9x branch for details]
+
+* Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
+ STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
+
+ du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
+ 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
+
+ md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
+ (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
+
+ mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
+ a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
+
+ rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
+ a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
+
+ tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
+
+ "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
+ 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
+ POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
+ with the old.
+
+ The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
+
+** Build-related bug fixes
+
+ installing .mo files would fail
+
+
+* Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
+
+ dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
+
+
+* Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
+ directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
+
+** Removed options
+
+ tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
+
+ stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
+ Use --dereference (-L) instead.
+
+** Deprecated options
+
+ Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
+ that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
+
+ du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
+ Use -m instead.
+
+
+* Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
+
+** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
+ conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
+ when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
+ conforming to older POSIX versions.
+
+ The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
+
+ date -I
+ expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
+ fold -WIDTH
+ head -NUM
+ join -j FIELD
+ join -j1 FIELD
+ join -j2 FIELD
+ join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
+ nice -NUM
+ od -w
+ pr -S
+ split -NUM
+ tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
+
+ The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
+
+ date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
+ od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
+ pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
+
+ A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
+ being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
+ problematic usages. These include:
+
+ Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
+ usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
+ POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
+ sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
+ tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
+ tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
+ tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
+ touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
+ uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
+
+ (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
+ standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
+
+ These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
+ Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
+ "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
+ Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
+
+** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
+ These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
+ between binary and text files.
+
+ The following programs now always use text input/output:
+
+ expand unexpand
+
+ The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
+
+ cp install mv shred
+
+ The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
+ data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
+
+ head tac tail tee tr
+ (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
+
+ cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
+ MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
+
+ md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
+ standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
+ binary if they actually read them in text mode.
+
+** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
+
+ cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
+
+ Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
+ For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
+ with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
+
+ dd changes:
+
+ On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
+
+ On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
+ signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
+
+ If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
+ then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
+ blocks until F contains N blocks.
+
+ fold changes:
+
+ When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
+ "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
+
+ ls changes:
+
+ -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
+ --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
+ --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
+
+ nice changes:
+
+ Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
+ in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
+
+ nohup changes:
+
+ nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
+
+ nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
+
+ nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
+
+ pathchk changes:
+
+ It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
+ "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
+ current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
+
+ The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
+ as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
+ <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
+ It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
+ <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
+
+ The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
+ permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
+ strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
+
+ csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
+
+ dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
+ rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
+ time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
+ using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
+
+ expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
+
+ expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
+ rather than silently wrapping around.
+
+ ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
+ foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
+
+ "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
+ and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
+
+ "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
+ directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
+ to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
+ file /tmp/a/b/file".
+
+ "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
+
+ stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
+
+** Improved robustness
+
+ Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
+ so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
+ no matter how large the result.
+
+** Improved portability
+
+ hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
+ and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
+
+ nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
+
+ 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
+ file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
+ coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
+
+ sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
+ in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
+
+** New features
+
+ chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
+ would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
+
+ cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
+
+ date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
+ option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
+ date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
+ specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
+
+ dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
+ effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
+
+ dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
+ OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
+ categories if not specified by dircolors.
+
+ du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
+
+ join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
+ join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
+
+ ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
+ when none of the listed files has an ACL.
+
+ md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
+
+ If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
+ prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
+
+ "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
+ "-FOO" is not a valid option.
+
+ stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
+ stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
+ stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
+
+ "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
+
+ uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
+
+* Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
+
+ Do not affect symbolic links by default.
+ Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
+ To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
+
+ --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
+ and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
+
+ Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
+ both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
+ are both used, then -P must be in effect.
+
+ -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
+ If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
+
+ Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
+ and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
+ incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
+ special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
+
+ "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
+ without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
+
+ Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
+ recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
+ the file system does not support it.
+
+ chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
+
+ chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
+ used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
+
+ cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
+
+ dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
+ "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
+
+ du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
+ directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
+ Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
+ chown, chmod, and chgrp.
+
+ du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
+ against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
+ final component.
+
+ echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
+ octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
+ POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
+ outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
+
+ expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
+ blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
+ non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
+ preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
+
+ "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
+ instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
+
+ ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
+
+ md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
+ lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
+ reporting incorrect results.
+
+ Fixes for "nice":
+
+ If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
+ it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
+
+ It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
+ happens to be -1.
+
+ It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
+
+ It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
+ closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
+
+ pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
+ now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
+
+ 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
+ either -s or -w.
+
+ pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
+ detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
+ pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
+ the file name does not look like a page range.
+
+ printf has several changes:
+
+ It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
+ can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
+
+ On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
+ specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
+ (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
+
+ The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
+ like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
+ printf function.
+
+ ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
+ and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
+
+ mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
+ operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
+
+ "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
+
+ rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
+ to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
+
+ rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
+
+ rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
+
+ "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
+ for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
+ when first encountering the directory.
+
+ "sort" fixes:
+
+ "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
+ output; POSIX requires this.
+
+ An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
+ mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
+
+ "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
+
+ tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
+ /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
+
+ tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
+ Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
+
+ "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
+ tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
+ When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
+ modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
+ more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
+ than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
+ and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
+
+ tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
+ To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
+ Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
+
+ "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
+ "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
+
+ tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
+
+ who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
+
+ The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
+ accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
+ options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
+ as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
+
+ basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
+
+** New features
+
+ For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
+ merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
+ some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
+ are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
+ done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
+
+ When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
+ commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
+ the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
+
+ pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
+ is longer than PATH_MAX.
+
+ cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
+ and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
+
+ cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
+ destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
+ preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
+ copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
+ system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
+
+ cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
+ selected bytes, characters, or fields.
+
+ dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
+ transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
+
+ dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
+
+ nocreat do not create the output file
+ excl fail if the output file already exists
+ fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
+ fsync likewise, but also write metadata
+
+ dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
+
+ append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
+ direct use direct I/O for data
+ dsync use synchronized I/O for data
+ sync likewise, but also for metadata
+ nonblock use non-blocking I/O
+ nofollow do not follow symlinks
+ noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
+
+ stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
+
+ With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
+ If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
+ string.
+
+ 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
+ BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
+ DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
+ Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
+ values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
+ This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
+
+ du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
+ list of NUL-terminated file names.
+
+ Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
+ changed as follows:
+
+ Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
+
+ Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
+
+ Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
+ prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
+
+ Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
+ and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
+ "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
+
+ Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
+ the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
+ the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
+
+ TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
+
+ 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
+ nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
+
+ echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
+ for compatibility with bash.
+
+ ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
+
+ ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
+ --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
+ This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
+ "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
+
+ In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
+ so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
+
+ false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
+ ls supports TABSIZE.
+ pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
+ printf supports \u, \U, \x.
+ tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
+
+ The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
+ pwd, sync, and yes.
+
+ 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
+
+ The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
+ even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
+ are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
+ there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
+ For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
+ an offset, not as a file name.
+
+ -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
+ Use -x or -t x2 instead.
+
+ -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
+ -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
+
+ -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
+ option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
+
+ The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
+ rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
+ Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
+
+ readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
+ and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
+
+ The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
+ consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
+
+** Removed features
+
+ md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
+
+ tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
+
+* Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
+ or more arguments between partitions.
+
+ 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
+ holes in the destination.
+
+ nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
+ descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
+ this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
+ and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
+ 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
+ terminates immediately.
+
+ 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
+
+ Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
+
+ The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
+ arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
+ not the empty string.
+
+ The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
+ 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
+
+** New features
+
+ 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
+ conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
+ containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
+
+
+* Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ none
+
+
+* Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
+ declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
+
+ timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
+ when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
+
+ seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
+ For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
+ on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
+ misbehaving.
+
+* Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
+ with status 0 when given more than one argument.
+
+ nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
+ as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
+
+ Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
+ stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
+ formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
+
+ factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
+
+ paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
+
+
+* Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
+
+** Configuration option
+
+ You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
+ e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
+ and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
+
+** New features
+
+ touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
+ operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
+ '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
+ before FOO's.
+
+ join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
+ "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
+ Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
+ "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
+ POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
+ by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
+ [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
+
+
+* Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
+
+** New features
+
+ chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
+ unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
+ encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
+
+ chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
+ --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
+
+ chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
+
+ du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
+ Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
+ stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
+ a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
+
+ du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
+
+ du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
+ not just the ones that reference directories
+
+ du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
+ of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
+
+ du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
+ (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
+ Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
+
+ When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
+ widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
+ columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
+ scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
+ not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
+ ragged when a datum was too wide.
+
+ du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
+ output lines
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
+ and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
+
+ od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
+
+ csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
+
+ csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
+
+ ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
+ arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
+
+ ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
+ (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
+
+ dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
+
+* Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
+
+** New features
+
+ date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
+
+ split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
+
+ cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
+ file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
+ Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
+ timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
+ resolution is the best we can do right now.
+
+ sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
+ The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
+
+ sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
+ Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
+
+ 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
+ in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
+
+ who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
+ who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
+ this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
+ the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
+ referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
+ file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
+ directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
+ Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
+ that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
+ in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
+ when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
+ *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
+ without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
+ 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
+ (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
+ 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
+
+ stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
+
+ fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
+ E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
+
+ 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
+
+ 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
+
+ seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
+ requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
+
+ seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
+
+ paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
+ without a trailing newline.
+
+ 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
+ to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
+
+ tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
+
+
+* Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
+
+** New features
+
+ sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
+
+ 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
+
+ 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
+ with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
+ 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
+ '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
+
+ 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
+
+ wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
+ size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
+ be printed without leading spaces.
+
+ Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
+ but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
+ has been removed.
+
+** Bug fixes
+
+ kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
+ Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
+ them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
+
+ '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
+
+ rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
+ unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
+
+ uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
+ corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
+
+ expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
+ and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
+
+ expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
+
+ split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
+
+ split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
+
+ 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
+ when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
+
+ 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
+
+** Fewer arbitrary limitations
+
+ cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
+ byte offsets are specified.
+
+
+* Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
+
+** New programs
+- new program: '[' (much like 'test')
+
+** New features
+- head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
+ N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
+- md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
+ MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
+- date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
+- chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
+ specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
+ on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
+ was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
+ old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
+- chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
+ on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
+ versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
+ pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
+ 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
+ chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
+ directory where M has write access.
+ 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
+ those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
+ a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
+
+** Bug fixes
+- chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
+- 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
+- split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
+- tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
+ delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
+ bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
+- du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
+- df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
+ non-glibc, non-solaris systems
+- 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
+- readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
+ lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
+- mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
+ This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
+ nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
+- date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
+- date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
+ conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
+- fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
+- fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
+- tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
+ as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
+ appeared one additional time.
+
+** Fewer arbitrary limitations
+- tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
+ Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
+- split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
+
+** Portability
+- 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
+ like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
+- stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
+- sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
+- rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
+ Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
+ if there were more than 338.
+
+* Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
+- false --help now exits nonzero
+
+[4.5.12]
+* printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
+* printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
+* printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
+* printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
+
+[4.5.11]
+* seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
+* seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
+* seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
+* df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
+* portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
+
+[4.5.10]
+* printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
+* shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
+* du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
+* du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
+ via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
+* portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
+* du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
+
+[4.5.9]
+* du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
+* work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
+ now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
+ truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
+* 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
+ hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
+ is inaccessible.
+* rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
+ under certain unusual conditions
+* mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
+ certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
+
+[4.5.8]
+* du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
+* stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
+* du accepts new option: --apparent-size
+* du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
+* du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
+* df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
+ corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
+ special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
+ 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
+ /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
+* test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
+ context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
+ mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
+ 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
+ writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
+ prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
+
+[4.5.7]
+* du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
+ contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
+
+[4.5.6]
+* du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
+* du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
+* du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
+ involving hard-linked directories
+* 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
+* df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
+ character-special and block files
+
+[4.5.5]
+* ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
+ nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
+* du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
+* du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
+ even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
+* du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
+* rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
+* ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
+ corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
+ has been specified.
+* ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
+ Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
+* ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
+ attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
+* Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
+ longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
+ specified on the command line.
+* shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
+ Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
+ and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
+ the first file untouched.
+* readlink: new program
+* cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
+ to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
+ output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
+* rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
+* when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
+ but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
+
+[4.5.4]
+* cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
+* 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
+* ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
+* stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
+* 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
+* 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
+* In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
+ failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
+* printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
+* The following features have been added to the --block-size option
+ and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
+ - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
+ For example:
+ $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
+ -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
+ - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
+ For example:
+ $ ls -l --block-size="K"
+ -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
+* ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
+ just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
+ sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
+* df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
+ block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
+* nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
+
+[4.5.3]
+* du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
+* 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
+
+[4.5.2]
+* 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
+* 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
+* 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
+* rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
+* printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
+* od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
+* tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
+
+[4.5.1]
+* du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
+* uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
+
+========================================================================
+Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
+point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
+
+[4.1.11]
+* 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
+[4.1.10]
+* rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
+ owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
+* df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
+* New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
+* Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
+ use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
+* The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
+ Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
+* 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
+* stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
+* stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
+ The old options will continue to work for a while.
+[4.1.9]
+* rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
+* new programs: link, unlink, and stat
+* New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
+* 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
+[4.1.8]
+* mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
+ that aren't moved
+[4.1.7]
+* rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
+[4.1.6]
+* New cp option: --copy-contents.
+* cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
+ traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
+* ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
+* The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
+ supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
+* cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
+ unusual cases
+[4.1.5]
+* cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
+* The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
+ For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
+ whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
+ A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
+ A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
+ The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
+* -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
+* Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
+* New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
+* You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
+ e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
+* The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
+ incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
+ df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
+ df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
+[4.1.4]
+* df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
+* dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
+[4.1.3]
+* ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
+ This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
+* dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
+ On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
+ resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
+ lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
+[4.1.2]
+* cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
+ now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
+ E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
+ cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
+* chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
+ these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
+ of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
+[4.1.1]
+* mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
+ the source files in the following example:
+ rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
+* ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
+* cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
+ Use --parents to get the old meaning.
+* When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
+ links between source files with --preserve=links
+* cp accepts new options:
+ --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
+ --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
+* cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
+ to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
+* mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
+ mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
+ destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
+ same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
+* remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
+ 64-bit systems)
+* mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
+ when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
+* mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
+ even though it's older than dest.
+* chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
+* cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
+ the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
+* 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
+* ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
+ than 8 characters.
+* ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
+ symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
+ one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
+* ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
+* ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
+* ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
+* ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
+
+ - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
+ '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
+ - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
+ and '05-14 23:45'.
+ - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
+ 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
+ - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
+ timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
+ specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
+ This is the default.
+
+ You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
+ or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
+ and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
+ if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
+ locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
+
+* --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
+
+
+========================================================================
+Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
+point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
+
+ [2.0.15]
+* date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
+* fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
+ [2.0.14]
+* nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
+ - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
+ - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
+ - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
+ 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
+ [2.0.13]
+* uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
+* pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
+ that specifies a non-directory
+ [2.0.12]
+* kill: new program
+* who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
+ --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
+ The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
+ the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
+* The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
+ - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
+ - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
+ [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
+* New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
+ 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
+ New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
+ Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
+ and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
+ the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
+* 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
+* 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
+ this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
+* date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
+ (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
+ when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
+ opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
+ This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
+ It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
+* factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
+ [2.0.11]
+* setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
+* 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
+* some DOS/Windows portability changes
+ [2.0j]
+* 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
+ [2.0i]
+* fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
+ 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
+ [2.0h]
+* all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
+* printf exits nonzero upon write failure
+* yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
+* date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
+* portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
+ [2.0g]
+* date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
+* printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
+ required support; from Bruno Haible.
+* stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
+* seq's --equal-width option works more portably
+ [2.0f]
+* fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
+ [2.0e]
+* stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
+ systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
+* still more portability fixes
+* unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
+ is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
+ [2.0d]
+* fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
+ [2.0c]
+* fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
+ [2.0b]
+* Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
+ [2.0a]
+* sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
+* sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
+* when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
+ there is any time remaining
+* who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
+
+========================================================================
+For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
+packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
+
+ This package began as the union of the following:
+ textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
+
+========================================================================
+
+Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+
+Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
+under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
+any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
+Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
+Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
+Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.