Findutils 4.2.26 is now available on ftp.gnu.org

[James Youngman]

I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.2.26 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 "stable" release of findutils.  It can be downloaded from
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/findutils.  The ftp.gnu.org site is very
busy, so you may find it more convenient to download findutils from
one of the mirror sites listed at http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html.

This release includes a range of changes, including bugfixes,
documentation improvements and small functional changes.  All the
changes since the previous stable 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 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg.  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 Jim Meyering, A Costa, Eirc Blake, Martin
Buchholz, Dmitry V. Levin and Bas van Gompel as well as the members of
the bug-findutils meilaing list for their help in preparing this
release and other recent releases.

* Major changes in release 4.2.26

** Public Service Announcements

I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
+mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant.  If you want the old
behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'.  See the
NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.

** Functional Changes

The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
input items to be separated by characters other than null and
whitespace.  This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.

Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab).  If this
information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error
message non-zero status.  If the information is not needed, find will
not spuriously fail.

A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
option, which changes other semantics too).

** Bug Fixes

If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).

If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
with 'Argument list too long'.  However, since this is precisely the
problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug.  Hence on
those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line.  This
problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
affected (albeit for longer command lines).  In theory the same
problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
(even so, the bug is fixed there too).


** Documentation Changes

The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.

The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).

The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
"-L -type l".

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