GNU findutils 4.3.5 is now available on alpha.gnu.org

[James Youngman]

I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.3.5 of GNU findutils.

GNU findutils is a set of software tools for finding files that match
certain criteria and for performing various operations on them.
Findutils includes the programs "find", "xargs" and "locate".  More
information about findutils is available at
http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/.

This is a "development" release of findutils.  It can be downloaded
from  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/findutils.  The 4.3.x release series is
intended to allow people to try out, comment on or contribute to new
features of findutils.  During the 4.3.x release series some features
may be introduced and then changed or removed as a result of feedback
or experience.  In short, please don't rely on backward compatibility
later in the release series.

While this is a development release, it is tested before being
released, principally with the regression test suite (run "make check"
to use it).  The Savannah website
(http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils) contains a current
list of known bugs in findutils (for both the stable and development
branches).

This release includes a range of changes, including bugfixes,
documentation improvements and small functional changes.  All the
changes since the previous release are summarised below.

Bugs in GNU findutils should be reported to the findutils bug tracker
at http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils.  Reporting bugs via
the web interface will ensure that you are automatically informed when
the bug has been fixed.  General discussion of findutils takes place
on the bug-findutils mailing list.  To join the 'bug-findutils'
mailing list, send email to <address@hidden>.

To verify the GPG signature of the release, you will need the public
key of the findutils maintainer, James Youngman.  You can download
this from http://savannah.gnu.org/users/jay.  Alternatively, you
could query a PGP keyserver, but you will need to use one that can
cope with subkeys containing photos.  Many older key servers cannot do
this.  I use subkeys.pgp.net.  I think that one works.  See also the
"Downloading" section of http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/.

I would like to thank the members of the bug-findutils mailing list
for their help in preparing this release.

* Major changes in release 4.3.5

** Functional changes

Updatedb can now support he generation of file name databases which
are compatible with slocate.  For some time, GNU locate has been able
to read these.

The /proc filesystem is excluded from the locate database (by
default; change PRUNEPATHS to modify this behaviour).

** Bug Fixes

#19806: The -samefile predicate might get fooled by inode reuse.  We
now hold open a file descriptor on the reference file to prevent this.

#19768: Better detection of corrupted old-style locate databases
(e.g. if the database is too short to include a complete bigram
table).

#19766: The frcode and code programs now detect write errors more
reliably.

#19371: Fix compilation failure on systems which #define open to
open64 (and similarly with the close system call).  This fixes
Savannah bug #19371, affecting AIX 5.3.

#19658: When cross-compiling, "make clean" no longer deletes the
generated file doc/regexprops.texi, because there is no way to
regenerate it.

#19391: When xargs knows that the system's actual exec limit is larger
than the compiled-in ARG_MAX, use the system's limit without
generating an assertion failure.

#18203: A duplicate report of bug #17478.

#17478: Error messages from find can garble the console.

#16378: Assertion failure if stat() returns 00000 as the mode
of a file.  This apparently can happen occasionally with broken NFS
servers.

#11668: FreeBSD extensions for time specification are now
implemented.  In fact, these were included in findutils-4.3.3.  The
change was listed as a functional change (whcih it is) and this bug
report was not mentioned.

** Documentation Fixes

The locatedb.5 manpage now documents the (default) LOCATE02 format
more clearly, and also documents the slocate database format.

The maximum and default values applying to the -s option of xargs are
now documented more clearly in the manual page.

--
James Youngman <address@hidden>
GNU findutils maintainer