* 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 . 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 header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older glibc headers. Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect. * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable] ** Bug fixes cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12]. ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0] pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2] rm -r --one-file-system works once again. The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0] stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2, and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1] tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files. The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5] tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly renamed-aside and then recreated. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5] tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files. E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would make tail stop tracking additions to "b". [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5] touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1] wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent processes will not intersperse their output. [the issue dates back to the initial implementation] * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable] ** Bug fixes id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1] id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1] rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly. The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to the presence of the empty string argument. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0] sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent. Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9] tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6] timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent. Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6] a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory, with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory, and with a malicious user on the same system was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0] * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable] ** Bug fixes chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled. Even then, chcon may still be useful. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0] chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the offending directory and all "contents." env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation] ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0] md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent processes will not intersperse their output. This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum. [the bug dates back to the initial implementation] mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to output the name of the file to stdout. [the bug dates back to the initial implementation] nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority call fails with errno == EACCES. [the bug dates back to the initial implementation] nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning message to stderr. stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS, btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3, nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition. Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file were first renamed or unlinked or never modified. [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5] tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well. [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5] timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does, for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]. ** Changes in behavior chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup fails with status 125 instead of 127. du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt. echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B). rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case. Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic. Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather than the less precise "Read-only file system" error. ** New programs nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process. ** New features env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment. md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums. So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum. mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix. touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support. * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta] ** Bug fixes cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even when the source file doesn't have write access. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1] touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60, to accommodate leap seconds. [the bug dates back to the initial implementation] ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently when the color of a more specific type is disabled. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90] ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0", for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink. tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written just before the process dies might not have been output by tail. Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live. [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5, and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o] ** Portability On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a directory or a symlink to a directory. ** Changes in behavior id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set. readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created, since mkdir will succeed in that case. ** New features ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P), added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks. stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input. With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected. If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments. ** Improvements rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case. rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear. However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to another improvement: rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB. * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable] ** Bug fixes cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers and libraries tested at configure time. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5] cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5] cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1] dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while printing a summary to stderr. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11] dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size of the input was not a multiple of N bytes. [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation] df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3] ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points. This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir, because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0] tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking. Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered, which is relatively unusual. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5] tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5] ** Portability ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem. Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a system, each command reports the error, e.g., link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory ** New features cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible. ** Changes in behavior tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO. tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO. Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified, and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely. * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable] ** Bug fixes dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes. dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received before data copying has started. install runs faster again with SELinux enabled [introduced in coreutils-7.0] ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory) would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory. Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU. [introduced in coreutils-7.0] sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key. [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".] truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in some locales. ** New programs stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering for its standard streams. ** Changes in behavior ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced. ** Deprecated options nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i. ** New features chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups. cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within a btrfs file system. cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc. tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files. * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable] ** Bug fixes date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week. [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ] date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future. Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball) and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git submodule is dirty. ** Build-related make check: two tests have been corrected ** Portability There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD, inherited from gnulib. * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable] ** Bug fixes cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a. Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested. ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month names from the locale database that have differing widths. ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file systems without xattr support. sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file. E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault. [introduced in coreutils-7.2] ** Changes in behavior shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default. This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems. ** Improved robustness cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater. Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least 2.6.9 through 2.6.29. [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0] ** Portability df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open. `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop, due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations. [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11] [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1] * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable] ** New features pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested. ** Bug fixes cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed. Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough data was read, or on process exit. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0] comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0] cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away, rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy. The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l). [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1] ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently. Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't. pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90] sort now handles specified key ends correctly. Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3. ** Changes in behavior cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems. cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does. ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/` * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable] ** New features Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2 and XFS. cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified mv: Always tries to copy xattrs install: Never copies xattrs cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain from overwriting any existing destination file dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O) mode where this feature is available. install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then do not modify the destination at all. ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type ** Bug fixes chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1] cp uses much less memory in some situations cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90), doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before processing the first file name seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers on systems with extended long double support and good library support. Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output, from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11] seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number to correctly print all numbers to the same width. wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known to be small enough. ** Changes in behavior cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed. Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years. dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better. Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors. du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25. ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.', rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL is still marked with a '+'.