* 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 time stamps 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 option to generate a specific number of files. * 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 time stamp 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. * 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.