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editing: NEWS

GNU coreutils NEWS                                    -*- outline -*-

* 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]

'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]

rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
  Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
  E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
  [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]

runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
  so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
  [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]

'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
  like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
  Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
  long been documented to be platform-dependent.
  [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]

stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
  invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
  Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
  and the system supported set of valid speeds.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
  Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]

tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files.  Previously it
  exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
  [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]

'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
  on all systems.  It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
  sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

** Changes in behavior

Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
  corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
  along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
  In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
  in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
  the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.

'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
  empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.

'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
  action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
  'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines.  (POSIX specifies this
  for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)

cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
  to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
  [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]

du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
  symbolic links.  POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
  sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
  could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.

'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
  reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
  This behavior is now documented.

ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
  if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.

printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
  unicode code points.  Previously is was restricted to the C
  universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.

runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors.  Previously upon
  internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
  from errors from the invoked command.

'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
  multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
  most 1 byte.  Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
  less than N.

'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.

** New Features

cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
  checksums.  It also accepts/checks such checksums.

cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
  No file name or other information is output in this mode.

cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
  print details on how a file is being copied.

factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
  in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.

ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
  select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.

mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
  asked to move a file to a different file system.

split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
  range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.

split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
  by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.

wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
  to give explicit control over when the total is output.

** Improvements

cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
  will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
  This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
  and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
  for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.

On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
  Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.

date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
  specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.

rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
  when removing directories.  For example EIO will be faithfully
  diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.

tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
  when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
  Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.

tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
  exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.

tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
  telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
  Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
  and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.

* Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]

** Bug fixes

chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
  All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]

If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
  cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
  before adjusting it to the correct value.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]

'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
  Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]

On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
  and B is in some other file system.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]

On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
  by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]

'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
  or lines containing NULs.  Their behavior now matches the documentation
  for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
  and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]

On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
  when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]

'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
  for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]

** Changes in behavior

cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
  simple copies between regular files.  This may be more efficient, by avoiding
  user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.

chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
  which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
  causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
  Applications should use ":" instead of ".".

cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
  so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.

date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
  padding them with zeros to 9 digits.  It uses clock_getres and
  clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.

dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
  and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.

dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
  For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
  102,400 blocks of data.  The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
  seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
  though they still work.

ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
  capabilities are rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
  about 30%.  It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.

ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
  before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.

stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
  behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
  Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.

timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
  if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
  when the --foreground option is not specified.  This allows users to
  distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.

** New Features

dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
  like FreeBSD and other operating systems.

dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
  entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.

dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
  variables.  The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.

** Improvements

cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
  This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.

On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
  are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
  not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
  'cp -p', 'cp -a').

The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.

With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
  any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
  since synchronizing can take a long time.

printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.

sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
  that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.

'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.

root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
  now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
  being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.

** Build-related

AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]

* Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]

** Bug fixes

chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
  even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
  is a non regular file.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]

csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
  when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
  [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]

df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]

df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]

du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
  heavily changed during the run.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]

env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]

expr no longer mishandles unmatched $...$ in regular expressions.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]

ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstattable files.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]

mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]

nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
  by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]

rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
  [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]

split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
  Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]

tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
  to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
  invalid combinations of case character classes.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]

basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
  on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]

** Changes in behavior

cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
  I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.

cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
  Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
  files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.

On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
  directory merely because it was removed.  This reverts a change
  that was made in release 8.32.

ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
  for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters.  TeX indexes should
  instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.

stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
  This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.

sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
  This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.

** New Features

cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
  of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
  cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
  will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.

cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.

cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
  when verifying tagged format checksums.

expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.

ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
  to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.

ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
  This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.

ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
  NUL instead of newline.

nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.

stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
  %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
  respectively.  %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.

** Improvements

cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$.  Previously the \r was taken
  literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.

cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
  and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
  A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.

md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
  This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.

df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
  acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.

rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
  This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.

stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
  and "zonefs" file system types.  stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
  type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.

timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.

wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
  where avx2 instructions are supported.
  A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
  it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
  [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]

dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
  when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
  to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
  reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
  [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]

df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
  like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
  when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
  filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
  [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
   the /proc/self/mountinfo file]

factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
  and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
  (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]

rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
  that fail to be removed due to permission issues.  Previously the exit status
  was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]

'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
  [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]

split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
  when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
  for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
  'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]

** Changes in behavior

Several programs now check that numbers end properly.  For example,
  'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
  Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
  on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
  variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
  and --parallel.

date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
    "A" to "M"  are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
    "N" to "Y"  are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
    "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
  For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
  Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
  rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
  [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
  coreutils package.]

date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left.  For example,
  if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
  Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
  and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".

ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
  Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
  from an empty directory, with default ls options.

uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
  and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.

** New Features

ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
  file creation time, where available.

od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
  file, greatly improving performance in some cases.

stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
  to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
  useful on network file systems.

** Improvements

stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
  operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.

stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
  "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
  stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.

** Build-related

gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]

** Bug fixes

'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
  after asking the user whether to proceed.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
  [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]

seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
  for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]

shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
  when outputting to less-common file types.  For example, the shell
  command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
  an "error truncating" diagnostic.
  [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
   (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]

sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
  [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]

'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]

'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
  if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]

** Changes in behavior

cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
  uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
  regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
  end-of-options marker.

nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
  parameters follow.

'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
  marker as before: 'a -- b'.

echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
  environment variable is set.

When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
  if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking.  This
  uses fewer system calls and avoids some races.  The old statting
  approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
  are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).

ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.

'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore.  Long ago, there were concerns about
  the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
  operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'.  Scripts using it were
  already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.

wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
  unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.

** New features

id now supports specifying multiple users.

'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
  introduced in POSIX.1-2017.

printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
  numbers in either the current or the C locale.  For example, if the
  current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
  now mean the same thing.  Previously, these commands accepted only
  C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point.  The new behavior is
  more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.

test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
  whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.

env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
  '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.

env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
  signal handling before executing a program.

** New commands

basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
  and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
  base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.

** Improvements

ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
  which is common in Asian locales.

stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
  stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.

stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
  on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]

** Bug fixes

'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
  If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
  then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
  Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
  even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
  [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]

'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
  Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
  that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
  [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]

'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
  for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
  and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
  Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
  and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
  [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]

'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
  even if it can't be traversed.
  [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]

ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
  display width between 6 and 12 inclusive.  Previously this would have
  output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.

'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
  overwrite a simultaneously-created B.  This bug fix requires
  platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
  in recent Linux and macOS kernels.  As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
  now silently does nothing if A exists.
  [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]

** Changes in behavior

'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
  it is self referential.

ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.

** New features

cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.

env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
  each processing step.

env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
  string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
  (shebang lines).

md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
  NUL instead of a newline character.  This also disables file name escaping.
  This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.

rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
  reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.

** Improvements

cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
  Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.

stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
  version of XFS.  stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
  and tail -f uses inotify.

wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
  which is especially significant on macOS.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]

** Bug fixes

b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
  [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]

dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
  and "direct" flags.  Previously some pages in the page cache were not
  invalidated.  [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
  and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]

df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]

ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
  to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]

stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
  [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]

tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
  On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
  invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
  this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed.  In each case
  timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]

** New features

timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.

** Improvements

dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.

tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
  rather than reading from the start.

Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
  and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
  for unknown long options.

** Build-related

Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
  not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
  Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
  mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
  races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances.  Since
  the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
  later, the races are still present on other platforms.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
  backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
  E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
  now fails instead of losing the data.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
  For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
  user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]

dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
  consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
  specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]

df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
  no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]

`groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
  Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
  [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]

kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
  Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
  [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]

ls now quotes symlink targets consistently.  Previously it may not
  have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]

split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]

md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
  ignoring some non checksum lines.  This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]

tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
  [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]

tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
  Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
  or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
  [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]

tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
  non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
  [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]

uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
  as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]

expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
  number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.

** New features

expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
  by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
  useful for visualizing diff output for example.

ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
  format links to files, supported by some terminals.

split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
  lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.

env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
  executing the subsidiary program.

expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.

** Changes in behavior

tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
  the pipe terminates.  That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
  responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
  waiting for data.  Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`

** Improvements

mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.

stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
  is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
  when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
  is effective in this case.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
  as appropriate for the -a, --preserve=context, or -Z options.
  [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]

date again converts from a specified time zone.  Previously output was
  not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]

Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
  when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
  [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]

factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
  158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]

tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
  which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
  [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]

timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
  The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
  after the command being monitored finishes.  Also the system needs
  to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
  [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]

wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
  Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
  depending on the size of the first file processed.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

** Improvements

The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
  The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
  Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322).  The old
  option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.

date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
  and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
  time zone is indeterminate.

nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
  set the maximum returned value.  OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
  set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
  nested level syntax allowed in this variable.

stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
  to Resource Director Technology.  stat -f --format=%T now reports the
  file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.

stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
  ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.

If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
  'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
  That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.

** New features

expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
  after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
  specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
  handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
  coreutils-8.24]

cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
  directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]

chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
  using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
  [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
  introduced in coreutils-8.0.  du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
  fts in 6.0.  chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support.  ]

date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
  System V style platforms where this information is available only
  in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
  which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
  two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
  defaults to a different SELinux context.

ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]

md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
  starting with "00" as missing.  This also affects sha*sum.
  [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]

nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
  Previously it would have output random data from memory.
  [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]

sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.

stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
  for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
  [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]

seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]

tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
  by a tailable file.  This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
  and is now handled correctly in all cases.
  [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]

tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
  to read from stdin.  Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
  file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]

tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
  Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
  only doing so if --retry is specified.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

** Changes in behavior

rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.

seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
  values for any argument.

stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
  they are out of localtime range.

sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
  and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
  The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
  like '+2' must be treated as file names.

** Improvements

dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
  interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
  The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.

df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
  mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.

du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
  when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.

install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.

ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
  written to a terminal.

ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
  and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.

stat and tail now know about these file systems:
    "balloon-kvm-fs"    KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
    "cgroup2"           Linux Control Groups V2 support,
    "daxfs"             Optical media file system,
    "m1fs"              A Plexistor file system,
    "prl_fs"            A parallels file system,
    "smb2"              Samba for SMB protocol V2,
    "wslfs"             Windows Subsystem for Linux,
    "zsmalloc"          Linux compressed swap support,
  stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
  tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.

stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
  same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.

** New programs

b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
  a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.

** New Features

comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.

date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
  display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.

date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
  and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
  That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]

cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]

install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
  are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]

ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]

mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
  multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]

shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]

sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
  that specify an offset for the first field.
  [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]

tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

** New commands

base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
  and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.

** New features

comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
  tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.

dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
  E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied".  It omits the summaries
  if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
  Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
  perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.

md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
  verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
  This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.

printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
  is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
  with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.

stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
  for transmission of pending output before application of settings.

** Changes in behavior

base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
  thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.

date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
  The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.

df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
  eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.

ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
  when outputting to a terminal.

join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.

** Improvements

All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
  which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.

Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
  more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".

md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
  by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
  This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.

dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
  For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.

du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
  upon detection of a directory cycle.
  [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]

ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.

stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
  pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
  and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".

wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
  by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]

** Bug fixes

dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
  Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.

df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]

du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
  Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]

chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
  This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
  depending on the implicit chdir("/").
  [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]

cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
  source directory is specified multiple times.  Now, consistent with other
  file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
  or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.

factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
  /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.

mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
  even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
  [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]

numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
  large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
  [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]

numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
  settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
  [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]

paste no longer truncates output for large input files.  This would happen
  for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
  character at the 4GiB position.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
  on all platforms.  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]

shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
  a diagnostic.  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]

tail releases inotify resources when unused.  Previously it could exhaust
  resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
  replaced before inotify watches were created.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
  [bug introduced in the beginning]

tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
  when those files are being created or renamed.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

** New features

chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
  to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
  king directory.  The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
  the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.

dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
  on stderr approximately every second.

numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
  to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.

split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
  other than the default newline character.

stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
  a useful setting with high latency links.

sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
  --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.

tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
  and output errors in general.

** Changes in behavior

df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
  these are generally explicitly mounted.  The --total option does still
  suppress duplicate remote file systems.
  [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]

mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
  The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
  instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted.  Also on case
  insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
  if called like `mv file File`.  The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.

numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
  and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.

tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.

tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
  for better conformance to POSIX.  This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.

timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
  which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.

** Improvements

cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
  and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.

cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
  non regular file.  For example when copying a disk image to a device node.

mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
  more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.

stat and tail now know about IBRIX.  stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
  system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.

wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.

References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
  in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
  documentation are provided.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]

** Bug fixes

chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]

cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
  context for existing directories in the destination.  Previously they set
  the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]

cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
  with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
  when reading the SELinux context for a file.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]

cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
  [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]

date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
  [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]

dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
  with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows.  First, conv=ascii now
  implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
  Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
  corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
  the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
  values are in octal.

A   W   E
     041 117 132
     133 112 255
     135 132 275
     136 137 232
     174 152 117
     176 241 137
     313 232 152
     325 255 112
     345 275 241

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

df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
  Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
  Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
  Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
  than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
  [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]

df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
  On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
  them being considered "dummy" mounts.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]

du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
  Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]

head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
  consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
  or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]

head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
  seek pointer is not at the beginning.
  [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]

head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
  now copies all input to stdout.  Previously nothing was output in this case.
  [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]

id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
  Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
  in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective.  For e.g.,
  when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]

ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist.  Previously
  it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults.  Now works as expected.
  [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]

numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales.  Previously
  in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
  [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]

ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
  [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]

ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]

shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
  [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]

sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
  destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]

tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
  [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]

** New features

od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
  orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.

configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
  selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils".  The selected
  programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
  shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program.  The
  install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
  or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default).  With the symlinks option,
  you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
  name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
  desired program.  The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
  the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms.  The
  functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
  depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
  If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
  pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
  separated list of programs you want to build separately.  This flag
  considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
  it suitable for embedded system.

** Changes in behavior

chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
  directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.

chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
  and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.

cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
  not done so in v8.21 and v8.22.  Note using this non portable functionality
  will result in the delayed output of lines.

ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
  will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
  and not output colors even with --colors=always.

** Improvements

chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
  causing name look-up errors.  Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
  in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.

install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.

numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
  syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
  Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.

shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
  the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
  uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
  inode storage used for small files on some file systems.

split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
  which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.

stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS.  stat -f
  --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
  rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]

** Bug fixes

df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstattable
  mount points.  Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]

df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
  a mounted file system correctly.  Previously df displayed the statistics about
  the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
  Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
  reason.  Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
  permissions.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly.  Previously it based
  the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
  [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]

ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
  is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
  [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
  with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
  system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]

mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
  from the source, when copying across file systems.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
  print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
  [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]

rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
  [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]

shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
  Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
  [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
   by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]

tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear.  Before, tail
  would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
  [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]

tail -F has improved handling of symlinks.  Previously tail didn't respond
  to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
  [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]

** New features

cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
  functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
  appropriate for the new item location in the file system.

csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
  used to identify the split points.

df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
  command line argument through to the output.

du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
  of the blocks used.

id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
  a NUL instead of a white space character.

id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
  mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.

id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.

join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
  option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
  lines rather than newline-terminated lines.

uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
  unique groups with empty lines.

shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
  control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.

shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
  the output.

** Changes in behavior

cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
  hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
  Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
  the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.

cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
  short -Z option.  The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.

dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
  not just the transfer counts.

df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.

stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
  as per the documented interface.

** Improvements

base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.

md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
  get better performance through using more system specific logic.
  sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
  This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.

stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
  and UBIFS.  stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
  now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
  (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.

shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
  Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
  outputs, rather than the number of inputs.

shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
  to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.

split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
  than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.

stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.

** Build-related

factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]

** New programs

numfmt: reformat numbers

** New features

df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
  to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
  omitted.  Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.

du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
  with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
  du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.

timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
  status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.

** Bug fixes

cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]

cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes.  That buffer
  would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]

cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
  Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly.  Before, it would
  interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-".  Now it's treated like "-b2-".
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
  another range.  Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
  "2:3".  Now it prints "23".  [bug introduced in 5.3.0]

cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
  which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
  [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]

factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]

install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
  permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.

pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32.  Also, line numbers are
  consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
  [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]

seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
  the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
  while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
  outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
  Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
  [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]

timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
  its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

** Changes in behavior

df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
  summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
  can be in any column.  If there is no source column, then df prints
  'total' in the target column.

df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
  the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
  Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".

cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
  to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.

nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
  deprecated since coreutils-7.5.  Use --line-increment instead.

** Improvements

readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
  -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.

stat and tail now know about CEPH.  stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
  system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.

stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.

** Build-related

Perl is now more of a prerequisite.  It has long been required in order
  to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests.  Now, it is
  also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man.  The
  generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed.  Building without
  perl, you would create stub man pages.  Thus, while perl is not an
  official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
  resulting man pages would be inferior.  In addition, this fixes a bug
  in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
  build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
  for a patched distribution package.

factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
  by avoiding incompatible asm.  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]

A root-only test predicate would always fail.  Its job was to determine
  whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
  the build directory.  As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
  Now, those tests may be run once again.  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]

** New features

dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.

md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
  file name escaping.  This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
  sha384sum and sha512sum.

** Bug fixes

cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
  This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
  on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
  This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]

cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
  permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask

du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
  a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory.  Instead,
  it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
  eventually exits nonzero.

factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
  to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
  The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
  numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]

ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
  directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]

rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
  than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]

rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
  "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]

seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
  increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
  Before, this would infloop:
    b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

** Changes in behavior

nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.

** Improvements

factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
  It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
  Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
  10,000 times better (just below 2^64).  The new code also runs a
  deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
  probabilistic test.

seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
  but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
  format-changing options.

stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS.  stat -f --format=%T now
  reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
  ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
  system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.  tail -f
  still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.

** Build-related

root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
  $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
  Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
  Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
  are run without following the instructions in README.

We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules.  I.e.,
  rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
  level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
  the targets in the corresponding directory.  Two directories remain
  unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/.  One nice side-effect is that the more
  accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
  was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]

** Bug fixes

df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
  be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
  certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
  For example, this command would fail to print "1":
  (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]

sort -u could read freed memory.
  For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
  perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]

** New features

rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
  Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
  used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'.  This improves compatibility
  with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
  processes will not intersperse their output.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
  rather than diagnosing the invalid input.  Now it reports this:
  date: invalid date '\260'
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
  Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
  lines output by df, can work reliably.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
  file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
  [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]

head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
  This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
  not output by head may be processed by other programs.  For example, this
  command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
    seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]

split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
  in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
  [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]

tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
  [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
   support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]

** New features

stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.

** Changes in behavior

su: this program has been removed.  We stopped installing "su" by
  default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01.  Now,
  that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
  patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
  have any reason to include it here.

** Improvements

sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
  or unwritable output.  Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
  rather than after potentially expensive processing.

sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
  to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
  [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]

** Bug fixes

id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
  the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
  that ID would be neither real nor effective.  For example, when run
  set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
  changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
  yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]

cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
  between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
  fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
  found.  Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
  and hence usually succeeds.  With NFS attribute caching, the condition
  was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
  precede the initial stat.  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]

stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
  [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]

** New features

split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
  the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.

fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.

stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6

** Changes in behavior

cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
  This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
  throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.

cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
  allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]

** New features

As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
  '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
  and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions.  Operator
  numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
  commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
  user-read permissions.  Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
  modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
  'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.

Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
  setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
  and setgid bits.  This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
  lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
  modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.

dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
  oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.

dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
  output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.

ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
  symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.

split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
  which changes the start number from the default of 0.

split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
  additional static suffix to output file names.

basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
  of more than one argument at a time.  Also the complementary
  -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.

dirname now supports more than one argument.  Also the complementary
  -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.

** Bug fixes

du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
  the command line.  For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]

mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
  has two or more hard links.  Before, it would reject that, saying that
  they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
  data loss.  In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
  referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
  typically still point to one of the hard links.

"mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain.  This would happen only when
  both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
  which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
  surprising rename no-op behavior).  Now, mv handles this case by skipping
  the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.

realpath no longer mishandles a root directory.  This was most
  noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
  but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
  --relative-to=/.  [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]

** Improvements

ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
  systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
  fail with ENOTSUP or similar.

'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
  instead of causing a usage failure.

split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]

** New programs

realpath: print resolved file names.

** Bug fixes

du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]

ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]

ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
  It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
  and the sizes written by -s.  This is for compatibility with BSD
  and with POSIX 2008.  Because -k is no longer equivalent to
  --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]

ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
  nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
  [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]

rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
  and NcFsd file systems.  This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]

split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
  (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
  It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
  the file obviously exists.  Same for -n l/2.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]

stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.

tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
  [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
   support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]

** Changes in behavior

df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
  With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
  second and subsequent columns far to the right.  Now, when a long name
  refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
  usually-short referent instead.

tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
  resides on a file system of unknown type.  In addition, for each such
  argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
  request to report it to the bug-reporting address.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]

** Bug fixes

ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
  dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
  [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]

ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]

sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]

** Improvements

md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
  This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.

pwd now works also on systems without openat.  On such systems, pwd
  would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
  more than PATH_MAX / 3 components.  The df, stat and readlink programs
  are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.

** Changes in behavior

timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
  it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...).  This is to support systems that
  implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).

** Build-related

"make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
  xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
  only .tar.xz files is enough.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]

** Bug fixes

chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
  I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
  [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]

cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
  directory.  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]

cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
  of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree.  I.e., if s/a and s/b
  are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
  to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
  [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]

fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
  proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
  Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
  Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
  [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
  introduced in coreutils-8.0.  The prior implementation of rm did not use
  as much memory.  du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
  chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support.  ]

pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
  [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]

printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
  [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]

split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]

timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
  timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
  [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]

unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
  followed by a tab.  In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
  We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

** Changes in behavior

chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
  when -v or -c specified.

cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
  files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.

** New features

date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
  separator.  It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
  with a space between the date and time strings.  Now it also parses
  "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
  variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"

md5sum accepts the new --strict option.  With --check, it makes the
  tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
  This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.

split accepts a new --filter=CMD option.  With it, split filters output
  through CMD.  CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
  the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD.  For example, to
  split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
    split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
  Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
  That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.

timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
  directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
  receive signals initiated from the terminal.

** Improvements

cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10.  Before, it would
  mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.

cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
  in gnulib.

df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
  or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.

join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
  unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".

shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
  For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.

stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.

timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.

** Build-related

Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
  when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.

Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]

** Bug fixes

tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
  with inotify support.  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

** Changes in behavior

cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
  of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
  - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
  - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
      Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
      for 2.6.38 and older kernels.  We thought all problems would be
      resolved for 2.6.39.
  - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
      Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
      the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.

** Portability

dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
  copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]

cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
  which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]

cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
  delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]

sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]

touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]

wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]

** New features

dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
  which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
  processed portion thereof.

dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
  in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.

** Changes in behavior

cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
  The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
  [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]

cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
  It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
  create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.

df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
  with longer device identifiers, over two lines.

install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
  Use --preserve-context instead.

test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]

** Bug fixes

du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
  part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
  directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
  argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]

join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
  even if the other file is empty.  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]

join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
  at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
  the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]

rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
  reject file names invalid for that file system.

uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]

** New features

cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
  support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2).  Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
  when copying a 1MiB sparse file.  Now, it copies bytes only for the
  non-sparse sections of a file.  Similarly, to induce a hole in the
  output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes.  Now,
  it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
  reproduce them efficiently in the output file.  mv also benefits
  when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.

join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
  output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
  the same number of fields are output for each line.

** Changes in behavior

join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
  This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
  join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]

** Bug fixes

split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
  is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
  has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.

od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
  it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.

sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
  corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]

sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
  (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
  do no work.  I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]

sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
  into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]

sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
  no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
  and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.

sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.

** Changes in behavior

sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
  performance gains.  Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
  to the number of available processors.

** New features

split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
  files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
  options to fine-tune the resulting output.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
  on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
  latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
  bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]

csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
  nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
  [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]

tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
  remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

** Changes in behavior

cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
  Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.

stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
  part of seconds since the epoch.  This reverts a change from
  coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
  To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
  if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
  Likewise for %Y and %Z.

stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
  However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
  the same way as the others.

stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
  listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]

** Bug fixes

du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
  link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
  following symlinks or via multiple arguments.

du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
  symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.

du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
  found to be part of a directory cycle.  Before, du would issue a
  "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.

split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]

tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]

tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
  and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
  [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]

tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
  In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
  while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
  [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]

** New features

cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
  which is useful for efficiently modifying files.

du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
  with FreeBSD.

sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
  line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.

sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.

stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
  for a file.  It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
  outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.

** Changes in behavior

df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
  rather than its aliased target.

du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
  with many hard-linked files.  With --count-links (-l), or when
  operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.

ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
  the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
  not been specified.  The new approach has nicer behavior in some
  locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
  of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
  locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
  [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
   for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]

rm's -d now evokes an error;  before, it was silently ignored.

sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.

sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
  no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".".  It now considers all
  zeros to be equal.

sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
  the sorting operation.  The number of sorts run concurrently can be
  limited with the --parallel option or with external process
  control like taskset for example.

stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.

stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option.  Initially it was
  merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility.  Starting two years
  ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning.  Printing the
  SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
  and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
  includes %C when context information is available.

stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
  option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
  rather than a file system attribute.

stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
  mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
  %Z directives of the --format option.  This matches the fact that
  %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.

touch's --file option is no longer recognized.  Use --reference=F (-r)
  instead.  --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
  elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.

truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
  Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
  relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]

cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.

ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]

sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
  in the locale database.  Also locales with 8 bit characters are
  handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
  that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.

sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
  Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]

** New features

join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
  file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.

timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
  signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
  duration after the initial signal was sent.

who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
  messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
  not accepting messages (mesg no).  Before, who would examine only the
  permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
  Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
  that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
  of whatever the permission bits might imply.  Now, when configured
  using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
  of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).

** Changes in behavior

ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
  sequence when it would be a no-op.

join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
  each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).

* 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 <sys/capability.h>.
  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 <wchar.h> header.  Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
  glibc <wchar.h> 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 command 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 accesses 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 capabilities 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 preceding 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 standard-conforming 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 timestamp, 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 timestamps 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 noticeable 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 '+'.

* Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]

** New programs

timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
  truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.

** New features

chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
  even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
  systems.  Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
  per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
  Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
  from the newer version of fts in gnulib.

comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order.  This check can
  be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.

comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
  of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.

cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.

dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
  With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
  until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.

df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
  arguments after all arguments have been processed.

If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
  expr support arbitrarily large numbers.  Pollard's rho algorithm is
  used to factor large numbers.

install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
  strip binaries.

ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.

ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)

md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
  'OK' messages.  sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.

sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
  containing a null-separated list of files to sort.  This list is used
  instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
  maximum command-line (argv) length.

sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
  represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
  When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.

sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
  specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.

** Bug fixes

chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message

od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3).  This is
  probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.

seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
  Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.

shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI

shuf --head-count is now correctly documented.  The documentation
  previously claimed it was called --head-lines.

** Improvements

Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
  HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
  of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.

join has significantly better performance due to better memory management

ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
  no matter how many files are in a given directory.  I.e., to list a directory
  with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.

od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
  specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
  padding the input out to the least common multiple width.

** Changes in behavior

stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
  Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]

** New features

cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
  file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
  'futimens' system calls.

** Bug fixes

chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address

cp -p copies permissions more portably.  For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
  "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
  permissions from the some-fifo argument.

id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
  with no USERNAME argument.

id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
  Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
  was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.

uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
  In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka &nbsp) is nonzero.
  On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
  number of fields for some inputs.

tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
  "echo > x; tac -r x x".  [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]

** Changes in behavior

install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
  [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]

** Bug fixes

configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.

"cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E.  Before this fix, using
  -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
  with EEXIST.  Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
  to create the destination file.  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]

dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
  of=/dev/stdout.  [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]

id now uses getgrouplist, when possible.  This results in
  much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.

ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
  of libselinux.  E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.

md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
  echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c -  Now, md5sum ignores that line.
  sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]

md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
  and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
  and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
  Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
  sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
  [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]

"mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
  mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly.  Now they're fixed.

mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
  when the destination had two or more hard links.  It no longer does that.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

"paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
  stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]

"pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
  [bug present in the original version, in 1992]

"ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
  the heap.  That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
  at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
  --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).

"rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
  prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).

"rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
  in more cases when a directory is empty.

"seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
  rather than reporting the invalid string format.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]

** New features

join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order.  This check can
  be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.

sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
  general-numeric, month, numeric or random.  These are equivalent to the
  options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
  and --random-sort/-R, resp.

** Improvements

id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
  would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.

ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences

seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.

** Portability

rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
  which have negative errno values.

** Consistency

install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
  not to stderr.

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]

** Bug fixes

Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]

** Bug fixes

cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
  permissions of a just-created destination directory.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]

tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
  of lower case and upper case characters.  E.g., this would fail:
  env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]

** Improvements

"touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
  whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
  Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
  fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]

** Bug fixes

"ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.

"rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
  in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]

** New programs

arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
  But don't install this program on Solaris systems.

chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file

mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)

runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context

** Programs no longer installed by default

hostname, su

** Changes in behavior

cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
  Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.

pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
  the header.  This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.

tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
  The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
  and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.

** New features

Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
  * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
  * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
  Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
  not change cp's exit status.  However "cp --preserve=context" is
  similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
  * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
  * id accepts new "-Z" option.
  * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
  * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
  * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext

The following commands and options now support the standard size
  suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
  head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
  tail -c, tail -n.

cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
  is not possible.

uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z).  As with the sort
  option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
  NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.

wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
  This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
  (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
  error messages.

** New build options

By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
  To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
  If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
  ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.

You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
  at configure time.  For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
  "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
  Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
  built (that's the new default).  However, if you inhibit the building
  and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
  of "make check" fail.

** Remove deprecated options

df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
  du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
  ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
  ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
  who no longer accepts -i or --idle.

** Improved robustness

ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
  In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
  For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
  should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
  However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
  loss of the contents of a/f.

stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
  in its 35-colon command-line argument

** Bug fixes

chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink.  Now, chmod fails
  with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]

cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
  Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
  reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
  and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]

cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
  name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
  no longer fails.  Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
  symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
  or making backups.  For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
  "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
  nothing.  The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
  destination is a symlink.

"cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv

"cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
  too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.

cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
  before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).

"cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"

cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
  than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".

date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
  in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.

du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
  in the total size.

du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
  directory.  Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.

ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
  first entry.  [introduced in coreutils-6.8]

ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
  a regular symlink.  This would happen only when the dangling symlink
  was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
  [introduced in coreutils-6.0]

ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
  ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
  before the name of each symlink.  [introduced in coreutils-6.0]

od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
  nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0.  This happens at least
  with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.

"od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
  the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes.  When the number
  of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
  od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]

./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
  no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0.  Now it diagnoses the error
  and exits with nonzero status.  [present in initial implementation]

seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
  so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.

seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
  and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.

"seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems

Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
  "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
  invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]

sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
  no longer provokes unaligned memory access

split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
  [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]

tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
  complement of Set1.  [present in the original version, in 1992]

tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
  [present in the original version]

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions

The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
  the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables.  It
  is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.

Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
  no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]

** Bug fixes

chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
  Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.

chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
  support but with insufficient /proc support.

"cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
  a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).

"cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
  too-generous permissions in some cases.  For example, when copying a
  directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
  temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
  users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory.  Fix
  similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.

cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
  more file arguments.  This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
  in coreutils-5.3.0.

dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
  operands, as POSIX and tradition require.

"ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux.  Introduced in
  coreutils-6.0.

A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
  a reasonable diagnostic.  Before, it would print this:
  "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".

pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
  directory is unreadable.

rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
  when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
  and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.

rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
  conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
  directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
  to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
  with "[...]".  If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
  to remove it.

"rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
  Before it would print nothing.

"rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F

"rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
  remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
  Introduced in coreutils-6.0.  Similarly, when a cross-partition
  "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
  a reasonable diagnostic.  Before, this would print
    $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
    $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
    mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
  Now it prints this:
    mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.

** New features

sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
  program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
  This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.

sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
  is printed.  Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
  --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
  --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]

** Bug fixes

When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
  were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
  This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
  To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
  ownership is successfully preserved.  Similar problems were fixed
  with mv when copying across file system boundaries.  This problem
  affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.

cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
  had too-generous permissions in some cases.  For example, when
  copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
  directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
  Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
  --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
  or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
  This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.

du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
  listed as second or subsequent command line argument.  This bug affects
  coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]

** Bug fixes

ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
  nameless group or owner.  This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.

A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
  made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
  way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.

** Improved robustness

Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
  trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
  Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.

* Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]

** Bug fixes

du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
  when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
  openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
  or newer).  This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
  openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.

"ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic

** New features

rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system

* Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]

** Bug fixes

chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
  with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
  --from=o:g (chown only).  This bug was introduced with the switch to
  gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.

cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
  This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.

With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
  For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
  successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.

* Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]

** Improved robustness

pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
  buggy native getaddrinfo function.

rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
  sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
  or NFS-mounted partition.

sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
  mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.

** Bug fixes

chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
  inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
  preceding command line argument.  This bug also affects chgrp, but
  it is harder to demonstrate.  It does not affect chown.  The bug was
  introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
  in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).

cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
  action was bound to fail.  This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.

With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
  or neglect to report file removal.

For the "groups" command:

"groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
    than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.

"groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.

"groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.

shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input

** Portability

Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
  compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.

* Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]

** Changes in behavior

mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
  process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
  uses a relative file name.  This avoids some race conditions, but it
  means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.

rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
  now fails without removing anything.  Likewise for any file name with
  a final './' or '../' component.

tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
  operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
  this only for pipes.

** Infrastructure changes

Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
  If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
  in README-cvs.  Although this represents a large change to the
  infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.

** Bug fixes

cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
  name is "." or "..".

"ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
  no differently than regular directories on a file system with
  dirent.d_type support.

"mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
  suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.

mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
  where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
  a slash and doesn't exist.  E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
  now succeeds, once more.  This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.

* Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]

** Changes in behavior

df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies

** New features

printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
  implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".

** Bug fixes

cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
  the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
  [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]

df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
  [introduced in coreutils-6.0]

ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
  [introduced in coreutils-6.0]

* Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]

** Improved robustness

df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
  report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
  (a negative number) rather than as garbage.

dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
  prevents malfunction on that system;  may also affect cut, expand,
  and unexpand.

fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
  (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.

pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
  where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.

rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
  hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.

** Changes in behavior

basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
  where the two are distinct.

chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
  set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise.  E.g.,
  'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
  set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
  similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'.  To
  clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
  'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'.  To set them, mention them explicitly
  in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
  'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR.  This change is for convenience on
  systems where these bits inherit from parents.  Unfortunately other
  operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
  cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
  bits are explicitly mentioned.  For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
  777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
  Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
  'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
  something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.

'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
  link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
  This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.

csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
  Emacs syntax.  As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
  interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
  . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
  ? operators.

date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
  the wrong date in some time zones.  (see the test for an example)

df changes:

df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
    therefore does not normally display them.  Also, inaccessible file
    systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
    chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.

df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
    exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
    whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".

expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
  (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
  second "*" is ignored).  expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
  errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
  used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
  now checks for).

install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
  e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.

install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
  instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
  not change the owner or group of parent directories.  This is for
  compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.

ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
  ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
  successful and the output is easier to parse.

ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
  However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
  if your locale settings appear to be messed up.  This change
  attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.

mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
  and sticky) with the -m option.

nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
  redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
  nohup.out".  Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
  $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
  response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.

rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
  default of using no argument still acts like -i.

rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory

seq changes:

seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
    information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
    You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
    for example, since the default format now has the same effect.

seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.

seq now uses long double internally rather than double.

sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
  silently ignoring one of them.

stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
  FMT is automatically newline terminated.  The first stable release
  containing this change was 5.92.

stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
  automatically newline terminated.

stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
  via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT.  That includes
  octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
  two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
  \v, \", \\).

With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
  standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
  Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
  or socket.

** Scheduled for removal

ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
  now evokes a warning.  Use --version instead.

rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006.  This
  option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0.  On systems
  that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
  command to unlink a directory.

Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
  -F) option in 2006.  Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
  would cause a problem for you.  On systems that support hard links
  to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.

** New programs

base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
  sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
  sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
  sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
  sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
  shuf: Shuffle lines of text.

** New features

chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
  as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.

New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:

'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
    hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
    later).  This has limited utility but is present for completeness.

'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
    time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
    2.6.8 and later).

'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
    on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).

ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
  list directories before files.

rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option.  This new option
  prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
  files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
  for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
  against mistakes.

shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.

sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.

sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
  POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.  However, when conforming to POSIX
  1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".

wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
  list of NUL-terminated file names.

** Bug fixes

cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
  file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
  usually printing nothing.

cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems

When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
  hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
  them with hard-linked directories.

fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
  a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
  inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.

fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
  a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink.  Before, such a
  misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.

ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
  unnecessarily.

ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
  rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.

mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
  now done atomically;  before, mv would first unlink the destination.

mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally.  Also, mv can
  now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b

rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
  all command-line arguments.

rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.

rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory

rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
  a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).

shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems

sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
  mkstemp function.  sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
  function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
  on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
  SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.

tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
  attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)

* Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
* Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
* Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
* Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]

[see the b5_9x branch for details]

* Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]

** Bug fixes

dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
  STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.

du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
  2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).

md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
  (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.

mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
  a directory like 'nonexistent/.'

rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
  a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.

tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.

"tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
  1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
  POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
  with the old.

The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.

** Build-related bug fixes

installing .mo files would fail

* Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]

** Bug fixes

chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit

dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters

* Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]

** Bug fixes

"mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
  directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.

** Removed options

tail's --allow-missing option has been removed.  Use --retry instead.

stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
  Use --dereference (-L) instead.

** Deprecated options

Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
  that the long-named option is deprecated.  Use '-k' instead.

du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
  Use -m instead.

* Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]

** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
  conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001.  The following changes apply only
  when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
  conforming to older POSIX versions.

The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:

date -I
    expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
    fold -WIDTH
    head -NUM
    join -j FIELD
    join -j1 FIELD
    join -j2 FIELD
    join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
    nice -NUM
    od -w
    pr -S
    split -NUM
    tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]

The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:

date -I TIMESPEC  (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
    od -w WIDTH       (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
    pr -S STRING      (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)

A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
  being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
  problematic usages.  These include:

Problematic       Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
       usage            whether you prefer the behavior of:
                      POSIX 1003.2-1992    POSIX 1003.1-2001
    sort +4           sort -k 5            sort ./+4
    tail +4           tail -n +4           tail ./+4
    tail - f          tail f               [see (*) below]
    tail -c 4         tail -c 10 ./4       tail -c4
    touch 12312359 f  touch -t 12312359 f  touch ./12312359 f
    uniq +4           uniq -s 4            uniq ./+4

(*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
    standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".

These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
  Austin Group standardization meeting.  For more details, please see
  "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
  Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.

** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
  These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
  between binary and text files.

The following programs now always use text input/output:

expand unexpand

The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:

cp install mv shred

The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
  data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.

head tac tail tee tr
    (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)

cat's --binary or -B option has been removed.  It existed only on
  MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.

md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
  standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
  binary if they actually read them in text mode.

** Changes for better conformance to POSIX

cp, ln, mv, rm changes:

Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
    For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
    with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".

dd changes:

On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.

On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
    signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.

If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
    then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
    blocks until F contains N blocks.

fold changes:

When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
    "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".

ls changes:

-p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
    --indicator-style=slash.  Use --file-type or
    --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.

nice changes:

Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
    in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).

nohup changes:

nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.

nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.

nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.

pathchk changes:

It now rejects the empty name in the normal case.  That is,
    "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
    current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.

The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
    as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
    <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
    It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
    <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.

The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.

** Bug fixes

chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
  permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
  strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1.  These bugs have been fixed.

csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB

dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
  rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
  time-of-day is changed while dd is running.  Also, it avoids
  using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.

expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.

expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
  rather than silently wrapping around.

ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
  foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.

"mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
  and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.

"mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
  directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
  to return to its initial working directory.  Similarly for "install -D
  file /tmp/a/b/file".

"pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.

stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist

** Improved robustness

Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
  so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
  no matter how large the result.

** Improved portability

hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
  and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.

nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.

'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
  file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
  coreutils' old configure-time run-test.

sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
  in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.

** New features

chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
  would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.

cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated

date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC.  The old --iso-8601 (-I)
  option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
  date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
  specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.

dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
  effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.

dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
  OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
  categories if not specified by dircolors.

du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE

join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
  join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",

ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
  when none of the listed files has an ACL.

md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.

If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
  prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.

"rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
  "-FOO" is not a valid option.

stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
  stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
  stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS

"touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".

uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.

* Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]

** Bug fixes

Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:

Do not affect symbolic links by default.
    Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
    To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).

--dereference now works, even when the specified owner
    and/or group match those of an affected symlink.

Check for incompatible options.  When -R and --dereference are
    both used, then either -H or -L must also be used.  When -R and -h
    are both used, then -P must be in effect.

-H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
    If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.

Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
    and group already have the desired value.  This optimization was
    incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
    special permission bits, as POSIX requires.

"chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
    without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.

Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
    recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
    the file system does not support it.

chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".

chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
  used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.

cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.

dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
  "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.

du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
  directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
  Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
  chown, chmod, and chgrp.

du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
  against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
  final component.

echo now conforms to POSIX better.  It supports the \0ooo syntax for
  octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately.  If
  POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
  outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.

expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better.  They check for
  blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
  non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs.  Unexpand now
  preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.

"ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
  instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.

ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.

md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
  lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
  reporting incorrect results.

Fixes for "nice":

If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
    it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.

It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
    happens to be -1.

It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.

It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
    closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.

pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
  now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.

'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
  either -s or -w.

pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
  detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
  pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
  the file name does not look like a page range.

printf has several changes:

It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
    can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.

On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
    specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
    (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).

The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
    like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
    printf function.

ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
  and --gap-size=N (-g) options.

mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
  operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.

"readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations

rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
  to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.

rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.

rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.

"rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
  for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
  when first encountering the directory.

"sort" fixes:

"sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
    output; POSIX requires this.

An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
    mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.

"sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.

tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
  /proc/modules.  Before, it would produce no output for such a file.

tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
  Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.

"tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos.  With no operands,
  tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
  When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
  modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
  more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
  than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
  and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.

tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
  To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
  Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".

"touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
  "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.

tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".

who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.

The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
  accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
  options may be added later.  Formerly they accepted unknown options
  as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".

basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes

** New features

For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
  merely because the input happens to come from a pipe.  As a result,
  some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
  are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
  done reading it.  This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.

When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
  commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
  the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".

pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
  is longer than PATH_MAX.

cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
  and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.

cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
  destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
  preexisting timestamp.  This saves work in the common case when
  copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
  system with a coarse timestamp resolution.

cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
  selected bytes, characters, or fields.

dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
  transfer rate.  The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.

dd has new conversions for the conv= option:

nocreat   do not create the output file
    excl      fail if the output file already exists
    fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
    fsync     likewise, but also write metadata

dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:

append    append mode (makes sense for output file only)
    direct    use direct I/O for data
    dsync     use synchronized I/O for data
    sync      likewise, but also for metadata
    nonblock  use non-blocking I/O
    nofollow  do not follow symlinks
    noctty    do not assign controlling terminal from file

stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.

With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
  If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
  string.

'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
  BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
  DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
  Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
  values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
  This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.

du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
  list of NUL-terminated file names.

Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
  changed as follows:

Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.

Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.

Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
    prefixed by '@'.  For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.

Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
    and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC".  For example,
    "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".

Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
    the environment only while that date is being processed.  For example,
    the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:

TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'

'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
  nanosecond-resolution timestamps.

echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
  for compatibility with bash.

ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.

ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
  --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
  This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
  "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".

In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
  so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:

false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
    ls supports TABSIZE.
    pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
    printf supports \u, \U, \x.
    tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.

The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
  pwd, sync, and yes.

'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:

The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
    even without --traditional.  This is a change in behavior if there
    are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
    there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
    For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
    an offset, not as a file name.

-h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
    Use -x or -t x2 instead.

-i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
    -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).

-s is now equivalent to -t d2.  The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
    option has been renamed to "-S NUM".

The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
    rather than two-byte int.  This makes a difference only on hosts like
    Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.

readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
  and --canonicalize-missing (-m).

The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
  consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.

** Removed features

md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.

tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.

* Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]

** Bug fixes

mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
  or more arguments between partitions.

'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
  holes in the destination.

nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
  descriptor.  This avoids some nohup-induced hangs.  For example, before
  this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
  and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
  10-minute sleep terminated.  With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
  terminates immediately.

'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:

Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.

The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
    arguments are null or zero.  E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
    not the empty string.

The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
    'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.

** New features

'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
  conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
  containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.

* 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.

timestamps 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.
  [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]

* 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.

* Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
- false --help now exits nonzero

[4.5.12]
* printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
* printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
* printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
* printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier

[4.5.11]
* seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
* seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
* seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
* df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
* portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP

[4.5.10]
* printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
* shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
* du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
* du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
  via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
* portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
* du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5

[4.5.9]
* du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
* work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
  now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
  truncates it.  Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
* 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
  hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
  is inaccessible.
* rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
  under certain unusual conditions
* mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
  certain unusual conditions where they used to fail

[4.5.8]
* du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
* stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
* du accepts new option: --apparent-size
* du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
* du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
* df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
  corresponding to the listed mount point.  Before, for a block- or character-
  special file command line argument, df would display that argument.  E.g.,
  'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
  /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
* test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
  context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
  mechanisms.  For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
  'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
  writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
  prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.

[4.5.7]
* du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
  contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)

[4.5.6]
* du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
* du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
* du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
  involving hard-linked directories
* 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
* df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
  character-special and block files

[4.5.5]
* ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
  nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
* du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
* du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
  even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
* du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
* rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
* ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
  corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
  has been specified.
* ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
  Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
* ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
  attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
* Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
  longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
  specified on the command line.
* shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
  Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
  and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
  the first file untouched.
* readlink: new program
* cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
  to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
  output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
* rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
* when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
  but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.

[4.5.4]
* cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
* 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
* ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
* stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
* 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
* 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
* In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
  failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
* printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
* The following features have been added to the --block-size option
  and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
  - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
    For example:
      $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
      -rw-rw-r--    1 eggert   src      47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
  - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
    For example:
      $ ls -l --block-size="K"
      -rw-rw-r--    1 eggert   src          46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
* ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
  just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si.  Fractional
  sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
* df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
  block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
* nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'

[4.5.3]
* du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
* 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument

[4.5.2]
* 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
* 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
* 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
* rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
* printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
* od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
* tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option

[4.5.1]
* du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
* uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.

========================================================================
Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:

[4.1.11]
* 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
[4.1.10]
* rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
    owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
* df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
* New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
* Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
  use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
* The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
  Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
* 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
* stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
* stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
    The old options will continue to work for a while.
[4.1.9]
* rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
* new programs: link, unlink, and stat
* New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
* 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
[4.1.8]
* mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
    that aren't moved
[4.1.7]
* rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
[4.1.6]
* New cp option: --copy-contents.
* cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R.  Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
  traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
* ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
* The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
  supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001.  Use touch -t instead.
* cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
    unusual cases
[4.1.5]
* cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
* The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
  For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
  whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
  A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
  A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
  The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
* -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
* Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
* New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
* You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
  e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
* The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
  incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
   df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
   df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
[4.1.4]
* df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
* dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
[4.1.3]
* ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
    This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
* dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
    On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
    resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
    lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed.  This may be a kernel bug.
[4.1.2]
* cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
    now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
    E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
    cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
* chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
    these: g=o, o=g, o=u.  E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
    of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
[4.1.1]
* mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
    the source files in the following example:
    rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
* ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX.  It warns and doesn't infloop.
* cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
    Use --parents to get the old meaning.
* When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
    links between source files with --preserve=links
* cp accepts new options:
    --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
    --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
* cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
    to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
* mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query};  provides a consistent
    mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
    destination files.  Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
    same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
* remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
    64-bit systems)
* mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
    when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
* mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
    even though it's older than dest.
* chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
* cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
    the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
* 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
* ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
    than 8 characters.
* ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
  symbolic links on the command-line only.  It is the default unless
  one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
* ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
* ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
* ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
* ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:

- The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
    '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
  - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
    and '05-14 23:45'.
  - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
    'touko  14  2001' and 'touko  14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
  - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
    timestamps like 'May 14  2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
    specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
    This is the default.

You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
  or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'.  GNU Emacs 21
  and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
  if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
  locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".

* --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".

========================================================================
Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:

[2.0.15]
* date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
* fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
 [2.0.14]
* nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
  - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
  - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
  - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
    127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
 [2.0.13]
* uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
* pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
    that specifies a non-directory
 [2.0.12]
* kill: new program
* who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
   --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
   The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
   the long option '--users'.  --idle is no longer the same as -u.
* The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
   - 'date -I' is no longer supported.  Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
   - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported.  Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
  [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
* New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
   'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
   New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
   Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
   and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
   the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
* 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
* 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
    this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
* date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
    (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
    when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
    opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
    This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
    It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
* factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
 [2.0.11]
* setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
* 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
* some DOS/Windows portability changes
 [2.0j]
* 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
 [2.0i]
* fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
 [2.0h]
* all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
* printf exits nonzero upon write failure
* yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
* date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
* portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
 [2.0g]
* date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
* printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
  required support;  from Bruno Haible.
* stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
* seq's --equal-width option works more portably
 [2.0f]
* fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
 [2.0e]
* stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
  systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
* still more portability fixes
* unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
  is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
 [2.0d]
* fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
 [2.0c]
* fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
 [2.0b]
* Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
 [2.0a]
* sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
* sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
* when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
  there is any time remaining
* who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup

========================================================================
For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.

This package began as the union of the following:
  textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.

========================================================================

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
Texts.  A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.

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