coreutils-5.2.0 released (stable)

[Jim Meyering]

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[ Here's an improved announcement, this time with a blurb about what
  `coreutils' is, no MIME, and a list of the changes rather than a link. ]

I am happy to announce a stable release of the GNU coreutils.
The GNU coreutils package is the combination of and replacement
for the fileutils, sh-utils, and textutils packages.
This package contains the following programs:

  [ basename cat chgrp chmod chown chroot cksum comm cp csplit cut date
  dd df dir dircolors dirname du echo env expand expr factor false fmt
  fold groups head hostid hostname id install join kill link ln logname
  ls md5sum mkdir mkfifo mknod mv nice nl nohup od paste pathchk pinky pr
  printenv printf ptx pwd readlink rm rmdir seq sha1sum shred sleep sort
  split stat stty su sum sync tac tail tee test touch tr true tsort tty
  uname unexpand uniq unlink uptime users vdir wc who whoami yes

Here are the compressed sources:
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.0.tar.gz   (6.3MB)
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.0.tar.bz2  (4.1MB)
  http://fetish.sf.net/coreutils-5.2.0.tar.gz   (6.3MB)
  http://fetish.sf.net/coreutils-5.2.0.tar.bz2  (4.1MB)

And here are xdelta-style diffs:
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.1.3-5.2.0.xdelta   (228KB)
  http://fetish.sf.net/coreutils-5.1.3-5.2.0.xdelta   (228KB)

Here are GPG detached signatures:
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.0.tar.gz.sig
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.0.tar.bz2.sig
  http://fetish.sf.net/coreutils-5.2.0.tar.gz.sig
  http://fetish.sf.net/coreutils-5.2.0.tar.bz2.sig

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 signatures:

235f64f2f4f9a1be7fc652c0fb6e631a  coreutils-5.2.0.tar.gz
ea024eaf04ee7a2a4270655d584445d2  coreutils-5.2.0.tar.bz2
df58c52b2a365997c119e78aad6932b6  coreutils-5.1.3-5.2.0.xdelta
b64054475c860943f6814878953dcd3d14943eb2  coreutils-5.2.0.tar.gz
cbfe111d30161520127f96980d069e0665c203b6  coreutils-5.2.0.tar.bz2
64d695111861fd2d854d571194516b2976368867  coreutils-5.1.3-5.2.0.xdelta


The rest of this message is a summary of the changes since coreutils-5.0,
the previous stable release.  For the more details and attributions,
see the various ChangeLog files.

=================================================================
* 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.

  time stamps 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.


* 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.
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