GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-

* Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]

** Bug fixes

'dd' now always diagnoses partial writes correctly upon write failure.

Previously it may have indicated that only full writes were performed.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

'fold' will no longer truncate output when encountering 0xFF bytes.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.8]

'fold' is again responsive to its input. Previously it would have delayed

processing until 256KiB was read from the input.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.8]

'kill --help' now has links to valid anchors in the html manual.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.10]

When configured with --enable-systemd, the commands 'pinky',

'uptime', 'users', and 'who' no longer consider the systemd session

classes 'greeter', 'lock-screen', 'background', 'background-light',

and 'none' to be users.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.4]

'pwd' on ancient systems will no longer overflow a buffer

when operating in deep paths longer than twice the system PATH_MAX.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]

'stat --printf=%%N' no longer performs unnecessary checks of the QUOTING_STYLE

environment variable.

[bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]

'timeout' no longer exits abruptly when its parent is the init process, e.g.,

when started by the entrypoint of a container.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.10]

** New Features

'cut' now supports multi-byte input and delimiters. Consequently

the -c option is now honored, and no longer an alias for -b, and

the -n option is now honored, and no longer ignored.

Also the -d option supports multi-byte delimiters.

'cut' adds new options for better compatibility:

The -w,--whitespace-delimited option was added to support blank aligned fields

and for better compatibility with FreeBSD/macOS.

The -O option was added as an alias for the --output-delimiter option,

for better compatibility with busybox/toybox.

The -F option was added as an alias for -w -O ' '

for better compatibility with busybox/toybox.

'date --date' now parses dot delimited dd.mm.yy format common in Europe.

This is in addition to the already supported mm/dd/yy and yy-mm-dd formats.

** Changes in behavior

'cksum --check' now uses shell quoting when required, to more robustly

escape file names output in diagnostics.

This also affects md5sum, sha*sum, and b2sum.

** Improvements

'cat' now uses zero-copy I/O on Linux when appropriate, to improve throughput.

E.g., throughput improved 6x from 12.9GiB/s to 81.8GiB/s on a Power10 system.

'df --local' recognises more file system types as remote.

Specifically: autofs, ncpfs, smb, smb2, gfs, gfs2, userlandfs.

'df' improves duplicate mount suppression, by checking each mount against

all previously kept entries for the same device, not just the latest one.

'expand' and 'unexpand' now support multi-byte characters.

'groups' and 'id' will now exit sooner after a write error,

which is significant when listing information for many users.

'install' now allows the combination of the --compare and

--preserve-timestamps options.

'fold', 'join', 'numfmt', 'uniq' now use more consistent blank character

determination on non GLIBC platforms. For example \u3000 (ideographic space)

will be considered a blank character on all platforms.

'nl' now supports multi-byte --section-delimiter characters.

'shuf -i' now operates up to two times faster on systems with unlocked stdio

functions.

'tac' will now exit sooner after a write error, which is significant when

operating on a file with many lines.

'timeout' now properly detects when it is reparented by a subreaper process on

Linux instead of init, e.g., the 'systemd --user' process.

'wc -l' now operates up to four and a half times faster on hosts that support

Neon instructions.

'wc -m' now operates up to 2.6 times faster on GLIBC when processing

non-ASCII UTF-8 characters.

'yes' now uses zero-copy I/O on Linux to significantly increase throughput.

E.g., throughput improved 15x from 11.6GiB/s to 175GiB/s on a Power10 system.

** Build-related

./configure --enable-single-binary=hardlinks is now supported on systems

with dash as the system shell at /bin/sh.

[issue introduced in coreutils-9.10]

The test suite may have failed with a "Hangup" error if run non-interactively.

[issue introduced in coreutils-9.10]

* Noteworthy changes in release 9.10 (2026-02-04) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp, install, and mv no longer enter an infinite loop copying sparse files

with SEEK_HOLE. E.g., this was seen on ext4 when copying sparse files with

extents that are being actively updated, and copy offload is not being used.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.9]

'date' no longer fails with format directives that return an empty string.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.9]

'dd seek=N of=FILE' no longer continues copying, overwriting FILE if it

exists, if ftruncate fails.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]

du and ls no longer modify strings returned by getenv.

POSIX says this is not portable.

[bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]

'fmt' now correctly diagnoses read errors.

Previously fmt generated a generic error for any read error.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]

md5sum --text correctly translates CRLF line endings with the MSYS2 runtime.

This also applies to the sha*sum and b2sum utilities.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

'numfmt' no longer drops custom suffixes from numbers it cannot fully parse.

[bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]

'tail -f --pid' can no longer exit upon receiving a non terminating signal.

On older Linux systems it may have failed with "Interrupted system call".

[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

'timeout' will now propagate all terminating signals to the monitored command.

Previously 'timeout' could have exited and left the monitored command running.

[bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]

wc now documents its --debug option, currently used to

indicate the line count acceleration being used.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]

When built with `clang -fno-inline`, memory allocation issues are again

handled in a defined manner. Previously programs may have crashed etc.

after a failure to allocate memory.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]

** New Features

configure accepts a new --enable-single-binary=hardlinks mode to build the

selected programs as hard links to a multi-call binary called "coreutils".

This augments the existing "symlinks" and "shebangs" modes already

supported by the --enable-single-binary option.

'stat' and 'tail' now know about the "guest-memfd" file system type.

stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type,

and tail -f uses polling for this file system.

'tail' now accepts the --debug option, which is currently used to

detail the --follow implementation being used.

'du' now supports the short option -A corresponding to the existing long

option --apparent-size, for compatibility with FreeBSD.

** Changes in behavior

All commands now markup option names in --help and man pages,

with bold attributes, and hyperlinks into the online manual on gnu.org.

The links can be configured with the --enable-manual-url configure option,

and the bold highlighting with --disable-bold-man-page-references.

At runtime all markup can be disabled with the TERM=dumb env var value.

'fmt' -w,--width no longer includes '\n' in the width of a line.

I.e., the specified width is interpreted to be an _inclusive_ maximum.

'ls --hyperlink' now uses more standard format hyperlinks.

'ESC\' (ST) is now used as a delimiter, instead of '\a' (BEL).

'ptx' -t is no longer a no-op, and now sets the default width to 100 columns.

'timeout' now honors ignored signals and will not propagate them. E.g.,

timeout(1) in a shell backgrounded job, will not terminate upon receiving

SIGINT or SIGQUIT, as these are ignored by default in shell background jobs.

'timeout -v -s 0' now prints the signal number 0 instead of EXIT.

The multi-call binary now only processes --help or --version options

if it is installed with a name ending with "coreutils". This allows

for more consistent handling of these options with unsupported commands.

** Improvements

The multi-call binary built with configure --enable-single-binary

is reduced in size by 3.2% through the more efficient reuse of the cksum

utility by the md5sum and sha*sum utilities.

'cksum' now validates its options more consistently.

E.g., `cksum --text --tag` now fails like `cksum --tag --text` already did.

'cksum', 'du', and 'wc' now exit promptly upon receiving a write

error, which is significant when processing many input files.

csplit, ls, and sort, now handle a more complete set of terminating signals.

'du' now processes directories with 10,000 or more entries up to 9 times

faster on the Lustre file system.

'paste' now supports multi-byte --delimiters characters.

'pinky' will now exit immediately upon receiving a write error, which is

significant when reading large plan or project files.

'readlink' and 'realpath' will now exit promptly upon receiving a write error,

which is significant when canonicalizing multiple file names longer than

PATH_MAX.

'timeout' on Linux will always terminate the child in the case where the

timeout process itself dies, like when it receives a KILL signal for example.

** Build-related

Programs now port to C23 platforms that strictly check types when

qualifier-generic functions like strchr are used.

'chcon' and 'runcon' stub binaries will be built on systems without

libselinux, when configured using --with-selinux.

'kill' and 'uptime' are no longer built by default. These programs can be

built with the --enable-install-program=kill,uptime configure option.

* Noteworthy changes in release 9.9 (2025-11-10) [stable]

** Bug fixes

`basenc --base58` would not operate correctly with input > 15561475 bytes.

[bug introduced with --base58 in coreutils-9.8]

'cksum --check' now supports base64 encoded input in untagged format:

- for all length adjustable algorithms (blake2b, sha2, sha3),

- if that base64 input starts with a tag like "SHA1" etc.

Previously an error was given, about invalid input format.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]

'cksum --check -a sha2' has better support for tagged format. Previously

an unneeded but explicit '-a sha2' did not match standard tags like SHA256.

Also non standard SHA2 tags with a bad length resulted in undefined behavior.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.8]

'cp' restores performance with transparently compressed files, which

regressed due to the avoidance of copy offload, seen with OpenZFS at least.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.8]

`env` on macOS, for now only when built with --disable-nls,

will no longer always set a __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING environment variable.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.8]

'nice' now limits the adjusted niceness value to its supported range on

GNU/Hurd.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

'numfmt' no longer reads out-of-bounds memory with trailing blanks in input.

[bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]

'numfmt' no longer outputs invalid characters with multi-byte blanks in input.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.5]

'rm -d DIR' no longer fails on Ceph snapshot directories.

Although these directories are nonempty, 'rmdir DIR' succeeds on them.

[bug introduced in coreutils-8.16]

'sort --compress-program' now diagnoses if it can't write more data to an

exited compressor. Previously sort could have exited silently in this case.

[bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]

'tail' outputs the correct number of lines again for non-small -n values.

Previously it may have output too few lines.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.8]

'unexpand' no longer triggers a heap buffer overflow with --tabs arguments

that use the GNU extension /NUM or +NUM formats.

[bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]

** Changes in behavior

'cp' with default options may again, like with versions before v9.8,

miss opportunities to create holes with file systems that support

SEEK_HOLE only trivially. This change is a consequence of the

abovementioned copy offload fix.

'sort --compress-program' will continue without compressing temporary files

if the specified program cannot be executed. Also malformed shell scripts

without a "shebang line" will no longer be executed.

** New Features

'numfmt' now accepts the --unit-separator=SEP option, to output or accept

a separator between the number and unit. For e.g. "1234 M".

** Improvements

'fmt', 'date', 'nl', and 'pr' will now exit promptly upon receiving a write

error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.

install, sort, and split now use posix_spawn() to invoke child programs more

efficiently and more independently from their own memory usage.

'numfmt':

- parses numbers with a non-breaking space character before a unit

- parses numbers containing grouping characters from the current locale

- supports a multi-byte --delimiter character

- no longer processes input indefinitely in the presence of write errors

wc -l now operates 10% faster on hosts that support AVX512 instructions.

** Build-related

chcon and runcon are not built by default if selinux headers are not present,

or if the --without-selinux configure option is specified.

This can be overridden with the --with-selinux configure option.

nproc no longer fails to build with Android API level <= 20.

[build issue introduced in coreutils-9.8]

* Noteworthy changes in release 9.8 (2025-09-22) [stable]

** Bug fixes

'b2sum' will diagnose --length values that are too big.

Previously it would have silently assumed 512 for any larger values.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]

'base32' and 'base64' when decoding will again diagnose partially

padded data that ends with a newline.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.5]

'basenc -d -i' will now strip '=' characters from the input

in encodings where padding characters are not valid.

[bug introduced with the basenc program in coreutils-8.31]

'cp -p' had spurious "Operation not supported" failures when

copying to non-NFS files from NFSv4 files with trivial ACLs.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]

'cp --sparse=always' missed some opportunities to create holes.

That is, although the copies had the correct data, sometimes

data zeros used extents rather than holes.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

cp missed opportunities to create holes when copying from file

systems like squashfs that support SEEK_HOLE only trivially.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]

cp, install, and mv now avoid possible data corruption on

glibc 2.41 and 2.42 systems when copy_file_range is used with ranges > 2GiB,

avoiding https://sourceware.org/PR33245

[bug triggered since coreutils-9.0]

'date' supports specifying multiple named formats with the last taking

precedence. Previously multiple specifications would induce an error.

[bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]

'dd oflag=seek_bytes' no longer mistakenly reports errors when the

output file exists on GNU/Hurd.

[bug introduced in coreutils-8.16]

'fold' no longer exhausts memory when processing large inputs

with a very large --width argument.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

'install -d' now produces the correct diagnostic upon failure

to create a directory. Previously it would have produced

a confusing error about changing permissions.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

"ls --size --block-size=\'k" could misalign output in locales

with multi-byte thousands grouping characters.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

'nohup' avoids implementation defined behavior setting umask,

avoiding a FORTIFY runtime failure on Bionic libc.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

'od --strings' with '-N' now works correctly. Previously od might

write a NUL byte after a heap buffer, or output invalid addresses.

[These bugs were present in "the beginning".]

'od -w0' will now issue a diagnostic and exit gracefully.

Previously it would have aborted.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.3]

'od -w' no longer silently mishandles enormous widths like 3037000500.

Instead, it either outputs correctly or diagnoses a too-large width.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

'od +N.' (where N is a decimal number) works again as per POSIX.

[bug introduced in textutils-2.0]

'od /dev/null ++0' no longer mistakenly treats the ++0 as an offset.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

'sort' with key character offsets of SIZE_MAX, could induce

a read of 1 byte before an allocated heap buffer. For example:

'sort +0.18446744073709551615R input' on 64 bit systems.

[bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]

stdbuf now works on AIX. Previously it would have been ineffective.

[bug introduced with the stdbuf program in coreutils-7.5]

'tail -n NUM' no longer can output more than NUM lines if stdin

is a largish regular file with a nonzero initial offset, and grows

while 'tail' is reading it.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

'tail -f -n +NUM' no longer mishandles NUM values >= UINTMAX_MAX

when the input is seekable.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]

'tail --pid' avoids some unlikely races if the kernel reuses PIDs.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.5]

'tty' now exits with status 4 with a special diagnostic if ttyname

fails even though standard input is a tty. Formerly it quietly

pretended that standard input was not a tty.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

** New Features

basenc supports the --base58 option to encode and decode

the visually unambiguous Base58 encoding.

'cksum -a' now supports the 'sha3' argument, to use the SHA3-224,

SHA3-256, SHA3-384, SHA3-512 message digest algorithms depending on

the argument passed to the required --length (-l) option.

'cksum -a' now supports the 'sha2' argument, as a more consistent

interface than the existing 'sha224', 'sha256', 'sha384', 'sha512'

arguments, which are now selected with the --length (-l) option.

'date' now outputs dates in the country's native calendar for the

Iranian locale (fa_IR) and for the Ethiopian locale (am_ET), and also

does so more consistently for the Thailand locale (th_TH.UTF-8).

fold now supports multi-byte characters, honoring their column width.

Also the --characters (-c) option was added to wrap at a certain

number of characters, similarly to --bytes in uni-byte locales.

nproc now honors any cgroup v2 configured CPU quotas,

which may reduce the effective number of processors available.

stty supports setting arbitrary baud rates on supported systems,

like Hurd, Linux with glibc >= 2.42, and some BSDs.

Also on other systems the full set of supported baud rates

is determined at build time if possible.

Commands that support hardware acceleration like cksum and wc

can now disable this acceleration at runtime through the

commonly used GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable. For example

to disable the use of AVX512 instructions in cksum, you can:

export GLIBC_TUNABLES='glibc.cpu.hwcaps=-AVX512F'

** Changes to conform better to POSIX.1-2024

readlink now defaults to being verbose if the POSIXLY_CORRECT

environment variable is set.

realpath now supports -E, which specifies the default behavior.

The corresponding long option is --canonicalize.

tsort now accepts and ignores -w.

** Improvements

'factor' is now much faster at identifying large prime numbers,

and significantly faster on composite numbers greater than 2^128.

fold now exits immediately upon receiving a write error,

which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.

'seq' is more accurate with large integer start values.

Previously 'seq 18446744073709551617 inf | head -n1' would

output the number before the user specified start value.

** Build-related

cksum was not compilable by Apple LLVM 10.0.0 x86-64, which

lacks support for checking for the VPCLMULQDQ instruction.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]

* Noteworthy changes in release 9.7 (2025-04-09) [stable]

** Bug fixes

'cat' would fail with "input file is output file" if input and

output are the same terminal device and the output is append-only.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]

'cksum -a crc' misbehaved on aarch64 with 32-bit uint_fast32_t.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]

dd with the 'nocache' flag will now detect all failures to drop the

cache for the whole file. Previously it may have erroneously succeeded.

[bug introduced with the "nocache" feature in coreutils-8.11]

'ls -Z dir' would crash on all systems, and 'ls -l' could crash

on systems like Android with SELinux but without xattr support.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]

`ls -l` could output spurious "Not supported" errors in certain cases,

like with dangling symlinks on cygwin.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]

timeout would fail to timeout commands with infinitesimal timeouts.

For example `timeout 1e-5000 sleep inf` would never timeout.

[bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]

sleep, tail, and timeout would sometimes sleep for slightly less

time than requested.

[bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]

'who -m' now outputs entries for remote logins. Previously login

entries prefixed with the service (like "sshd") were not matched.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.4]

** Improvements

'logname' correctly returns the user who logged in the session,

on more systems. Previously on musl or uclibc it would have merely

output the LOGNAME environment variable.

* Noteworthy changes in release 9.6 (2025-01-17) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp fixes support for --update=none-fail, which would have been

rejected as an invalid option.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.5]

cp,mv --update no longer overrides --interactive or --force.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.3]

csplit no longer creates empty files given empty input.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

ls and printf fix shell quoted output in the edge case of escaped

first and last characters, and single quotes in the string.

[bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]

ls -l no longer outputs "Permission denied" errors on NFS

which may happen with files without read permission, and which resulted

in inaccurate indication of ACLs (missing '+' flag after mode).

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.4]

ls -l no longer outputs "Not supported" errors on virtiofs.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.4]

mv works again with macFUSE file systems. Previously it would

have exited with a "Function not implemented" error.

[bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]

nproc gives more consistent results on systems with more than 1024 CPUs.

Previously it would have ignored the affinity mask on such systems.

[bug introduced with nproc in coreutils-8.1]

numfmt --from=iec-i now works with numbers without a suffix.

Previously such numbers were rejected with an error.

[bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]

printf now diagnoses attempts to treat empty strings as numbers,

as per POSIX. For example, "printf '%d' ''" now issues a diagnostic

and fails instead of silently succeeding.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

pwd no longer outputs an erroneous double slash on systems

where the system getcwd() was completely replaced.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]

'shuf' generates more-random output when the output is small.

[bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]

`tail --follow=name` no longer waits indefinitely for watched

file names that are moved elsewhere within the same file system.

[bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

`tail --follow` without --retry, will consistently exit with failure status

where inotify is not used, when all followed files become inaccessible.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

`tail --follow --pid=PID` will now exit when the PID dies,

even in the presence of blocking inputs like unopened fifos.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

'tail -c 4096 /dev/zero' no longer loops forever.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

** Changes in behavior

'factor' now buffers output more efficiently in some cases.

install -C now dereferences symlink sources when comparing,

rather than always treating as different and performing the copy.

kill -l and -t now list signal 0, as it's a valid signal to send.

ls's -f option now simply acts like -aU, instead of also ignoring

some earlier options. For example 'ls -fl' and 'ls -lf' are now

equivalent because -f no longer ignores an earlier -l. The new

behavior is more orthogonal and is compatible with FreeBSD.

stat -f -c%T now reports the "fuseblk" file system type as "fuse",

given that there is no longer a distinct "ctl" fuse variant file system.

** New Features

cksum -a now supports the "crc32b" option, which calculates the CRC

of the input as defined by ITU V.42, as used by gzip for example.

For performance pclmul instructions are used where supported.

ls now supports the --sort=name option,

to explicitly select the default operation of sorting by file name.

printf now supports indexed arguments, using the POSIX:2024 specified

%<i>$ format, where '<i>' is an integer referencing a particular argument,

thus allowing repetition or reordering of printf arguments.

test supports the POSIX:2024 specified '<' and '>' operators with strings,

to compare the string locale collating order.

timeout now supports the POSIX:2024 specified -f, and -p short options,

corresponding to --foreground, and --preserve-status respectively.

** Improvements

cksum -a crc, makes use of AVX2, AVX512, and ARMv8 SIMD extensions

for time reductions of up to 40%, 60%, and 80% respectively.

'head -c NUM', 'head -n NUM', 'nl -l NUM', 'nproc --ignore NUM',

'tail -c NUM', 'tail -n NUM', and 'tail --max-unchanged-stats NUM'

no longer fail merely because NUM stands for 2**64 or more.

sort operates more efficiently when used on pseudo files with

an apparent size of 0, like those in /proc.

stat and tail now know about the "bcachefs", and "pidfs" file system types.

stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type,

and tail -f uses inotify for these file systems.

wc now reads a minimum of 256KiB at a time.

This was previously 16KiB and increasing to 256KiB was seen to increase

wc -l performance by about 10% when reading cached files on modern systems.

* Noteworthy changes in release 9.5 (2024-03-28) [stable]

** Bug fixes

chmod -R now avoids a race where an attacker may replace a traversed file

with a symlink, causing chmod to operate on an unintended file.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

cp, mv, and install no longer issue spurious diagnostics like "failed

to preserve ownership" when copying to GNU/Linux CIFS file systems.

They do this by working around some Linux CIFS bugs.

cp --no-preserve=mode will correctly maintain set-group-ID bits

for created directories. Previously on systems that didn't support ACLs,

cp would have reset the set-group-ID bit on created directories.

[bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]

join and uniq now support multi-byte characters better.

For example, 'join -tX' now works even if X is a multi-byte character,

and both programs now treat multi-byte characters like U+3000

IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE as blanks if the current locale treats them so.

numfmt options like --suffix no longer have an arbitrary 127-byte limit.

[bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]

mktemp with --suffix now better diagnoses templates with too few X's.

Previously it conflated the insignificant --suffix in the error.

[bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]

sort again handles thousands grouping characters in single-byte locales

where the grouping character is greater than CHAR_MAX. For e.g. signed

character platforms with a 0xA0 (aka &nbsp) grouping character.

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]

split --line-bytes with a mixture of very long and short lines

no longer overwrites the heap (CVE-2024-0684).

[bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]

tail no longer mishandles input from files in /proc and /sys file systems,

on systems with a page size larger than the stdio BUFSIZ.

[This bug was present in "the beginning".]

timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might kill arbitrary

processes after a failed process fork.

[bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]

timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might fail to

kill monitored processes immediately after forking them.

[bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]

wc no longer fails to count unprintable characters as parts of words.

[bug introduced in textutils-2.1]

** Changes in behavior

base32 and base64 no longer require padding when decoding.

Previously an error was given for non padded encoded data.

base32 and base64 have improved detection of corrupted encodings.

Previously encodings with non zero padding bits were accepted.

basenc --base16 -d now supports lower case hexadecimal characters.

Previously an error was given for lower case hex digits.

cp --no-clobber, and mv -n no longer exit with failure status if

existing files are encountered in the destination. Instead they revert

to the behavior from before v9.2, silently skipping existing files.

ls --dired now implies long format output without hyperlinks enabled,

and will take precedence over previously specified formats or hyperlink mode.

numfmt will accept lowercase 'k' to indicate Kilo or Kibi units on input,

and uses lowercase 'k' when outputting such units in '--to=si' mode.

pinky no longer tries to canonicalize the user's login location by default,

rather requiring the new --lookup option to enable this often slow feature.

wc no longer ignores encoding errors when counting words.

Instead, it treats them as non white space.

** New features

chgrp now accepts the --from=OWNER:GROUP option to restrict changes to files

with matching current OWNER and/or GROUP, as already supported by chown(1).

chmod adds support for -h, -H,-L,-P, and --dereference options, providing

more control over symlink handling. This supports more secure handling of

CLI arguments, and is more consistent with chown, and chmod on other systems.

cp now accepts the --keep-directory-symlink option (like tar), to preserve

and follow existing symlinks to directories in the destination.

cp and mv now accept the --update=none-fail option, which is similar

to the --no-clobber option, except that existing files are diagnosed,

and the command exits with failure status if existing files.

The -n,--no-clobber option is best avoided due to platform differences.

env now accepts the -a,--argv0 option to override the zeroth argument

of the command being executed.

mv now accepts an --exchange option, which causes the source and

destination to be exchanged. It should be combined with

--no-target-directory (-T) if the destination is a directory.

The exchange is atomic if source and destination are on a single

file system that supports atomic exchange; --exchange is not yet

supported in other situations.

od now supports printing IEEE half precision floating point with -t fH,

or brain 16 bit floating point with -t fB, where supported by the compiler.

tail now supports following multiple processes, with repeated --pid options.

** Improvements

cp,mv,install,cat,split now read and write a minimum of 256KiB at a time.

This was previously 128KiB and increasing to 256KiB was seen to increase

throughput by 10-20% when reading cached files on modern systems.

env,kill,timeout now support unnamed signals. kill(1) for example now

supports sending such signals, and env(1) will list them appropriately.

SELinux operations in file copy operations are now more efficient,

avoiding unneeded MCS/MLS label translation.

sort no longer dynamically links to libcrypto unless -R is used.

This decreases startup overhead in the typical case.

wc is now much faster in single-byte locales and somewhat faster in

multi-byte locales.

* 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]