GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout) * Major changes in release 4.4.3-git, YYYY-MM-DD ** Bug Fixes #29949: find -execdir does not change working directory #27563: -L breaks -execdir #19593: -execdir .... {} + has suboptimal performance (see below) ** Performance changes The find program will once again build argument lists longer than 1 with "-execdir ...+". The upper limit of 1 argument for execdir was introduced as a workaround in findutils-4.3.4. The limit is now removed, but find still does not issue the maximum possible number of arguments, since an exec will occur each time find encounters a subdirectory (if at least one argument is pending). * Major changes in release 4.4.2, 2009-11-26 ** Functional Enhancements to find patch #4848: Patch - Support for SELinux * Major changes in release 4.4.2, 2009-05-16 ** Bug Fixes #26537: find -prune now makes sure it has valid stat() information. ** Translations Updated the Slovenian translation. * Major changes in release 4.4.1, 2009-04-21 ** Bug Fixes On some systems without support for a boolean type (for example some versions of the AIX C compiler), find's regular expression implementation fails to support case-insensitive regular expression matching, causing -iregex to behave like -regex. This is now fixed. #25764: remove duplicate entry for 'proc' in updatedb's $PRUNEFS. #25154: Allow compilation with C compilers that don't allow declarations to follow statements. #25144: Misleading error message when argument to find -user is an unknown user or is missing. #24283: -printf %TY causes NULL pointer dereference on Solaris. #24169: find would segfault if the -newerXY test was not followed by any argument. #23996: integer overflow on some platforms when parsing "-used 3". #23663: crash in some locales for -printf %AX (this problem seems to have affected only the CVS code for 4.5.x, and not any public releases, but it was a problem with the original fix for bug #22662) #22662: find -printf %AX appends nanoseconds in the right place now. ** Functional Enhancements to find If the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, the system's definition of "yes" and "no" responses are used to interpret the response to questions from -ok and -okdir. The default is still to use information from the findutils message translations. ** Documentation Enhancements Both the Texinfo manual and the find manual page now include a more precise description of how your locale configuration affects the interpretation of regular expressions and how your response to prompts from the -ok action are interpreted. Added a worked example describing how to find the shallowest instances of a given directory name (or names) in a directory hierarchy. The file README-CVS has been renamed to README-hacking and improved. ** Translations Updated translations: Catalan, French, German, Indonesian, Irish, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian, Swedish, Vietnamese, Chinese (simplified), Lithuanian. * Major changes in release 4.4.0, 2008-03-15 The 4.4.0 release of findutils is a stable release, succeeding the final release in the previous development series, 4.3.13. However, since many users will have previously been using the previous stable release series, this section describes the changes between the 4.2.33 release (which was the final 4.2.x release) and 4.3.0. Some items in the lists of changes are prefixed by bug numbers (though some of them are simply enhancements, not bugs). Apart from the changes in version number and development versus stable status, the only differences between 4.3.13 and 4.4.0 are bug fixes #15472 and #20873. It's possible that some of the bug fixes mentioned as fixed are in fact fixes for bugs both introduced and fixed in 4.3.x (and thus not present in 4.2.x at all). While I have tried not to list those, some may have slipped through. ** Functional enhancements to locate *** slocate compatibility The slocate database format is supported, both for reading by locate and writing by updatedb. Preliminary changes intended to eventually allow setuid operation of locate have also been made. For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a set-user-ID program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please make sure that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate program). Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security mode (at the moment, GNU updatedb will not do this) forces locate's "-e" option to be turned on, and that has an effect on the "-S" option which is probably surprising for most users. *** Other changes Locate can now read old-format locate databases generated on machines with a different byte order. It does this by guessing the byte order, so the result is not completely reliable. If you need to share databases between machines of different architectures, you should use the LOCATE02 format (which has other advantages, as explained in the documentation). A new option, --max-database-age, has been added to locate. Translation of locate --limit problems is improved. The /proc filesystem is excluded from the locate database (by default; change PRUNEPATHS to modify this behaviour). ** Functional enhancements to find *** fts By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search extremely deep directory hierarchies. You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS". Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts: With fts Without fts default configuration find oldfind configure --with-fts find oldfind configure --without-fts ftsfind find New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file can be read, written or executed respectively. *** Changes to printf The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S, which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file. *** Changes to -perm The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files. For over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that this change will happen. We now issue a warning indicating that the change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make this change in the 4.2.x series). *** Time stamp resolution The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin, -cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second time stamps, including the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments. The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second time stamps: atime ctime mtime %a %c %t %AS %CS %TS %AT %CT %TT %A+ %C+ %T+ %AX %CX %TX *** Changes to -prune The -prune action now always evaluates as true (this is also a bug fix). *** New tests The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for files. One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose name id the argument. X and Y can be: a Access time B Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported) c Change time m Modification time t Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison against a file status time, the argument is a time string. Not yet supported. For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if the file being considered was accessed more recently than the reference file was modified. The -newerXY test supports subsecond timestamps where these are available. The X=B variant is not yet implemented. #11668: FreeBSD extensions for time specification are now implemented. *** Other changes to find #20688: The warning printed by -name or -iname when the pattern to match contains a slash can now be silenced by -nowarn. This warning was originally introduced unconditionally in 4.2.21. For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information about find's internal state and progress. The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print"). You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines which have missing expressions, such as find . ( ) find . ! find . -a find . \( -not \) find . \( -true -a *** Standards conformance POSIX will standardise -path, so the documentation no longer claims that -wholename is the 'canonical' test, and -ipath no longer generates a warning. When the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, "find -perm +a+w" is rejected as invalid. Some other similar mode strings starting with '+' which are not valid in POSIX are also rejected. Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an expression. (Savannah bug #15235). #21039: Setting the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable now turns off warnings by default, because POSIX requires that only diagnostic messages (and -ok prompts) are printed on STDERR, and diagnostic messages must also result in a nonzero exit status. #20803: POSIX requires that -prune always returns true. Previously it returned false when -depth was in effect and true otherwise. ** Functional ehnahcements to xargs While there are a number of bug fixes in xargs in this release (as compared to the previous stable release), there are no functional enhancements as such. ** Performance Enhancements *** Cost-based optimiser Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query optimisation level. To see this in action, try find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z and compare the optimised query with: find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z and find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early if possible). ** Security Fixes #20014: Findutils-4.3.7 includes a patch for a potential security problem in locate. When locate read an old-format database, it read file names into a fixed-length buffer allocated on the heap without checking for overflow. Although overflowing a heap buffer is often somewhat safer than overflowing a buffer on the stack, this bug still has potential security implications. This bug also affected the following previous findutils releases: - All releases prior to 4.2.31 - Findutils 4.3.0 to 4.3.6. This bug has been assigned CVE number CVE-2007-2452. ** Bug Fixes #22057: Actually rename the old locate database to the new one atomically, instead of just claiming the rename is atomic in a comment. #22056: -Xtime tests are off by one second (e.g. rm -f x; touch x; find x -mtime 0 should print x). #21960: xargs should collect the exit status of child processes even if the total count of unreaped children has not yet reached the maximum allowed. #21568: Switch to checking the gnulib code out with native git, not CVS. This affects mainly those who check findutils code out of CVS. #20970: Trailing slash on directory arguments breaks -name. "find foo/ -name foo" now correctly matches foo and printf foo/. See POSIX interp http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/uploads/40/14959/AI-186.txt #20865: Using both -delete and -prune without explicitly using -depth is now an error. Traditionally, -delete has always turned -depth on anyway, so this is not a functional change. However, using -depth (implicitly or explicitly) makes -prune a no-op. This change is intended to avoid nasty surprises for people who test with "-print" and then change it to "-delete" when they are happy. #20834: Avoid segmentation violation for -execdir when $PATH is unset. Assume that the PATH is safe in this situation. #20802: If -delete fails, find's exit status will now be non-zero. However, find still skips trying to delete ".". #20547: The version information printed by find, xargs, locate, updatedb, frcode and code now complies with the GNU Project's coding standards. #20310: configure uses hosts's support status for "sort -z" when generating the updatedb script for use on the target. This is inappropriate when cross-compiling, so avoid doing that. #20273: When xargs is successful without consuming all of stdin (for example, with the -E option), and stdin is seekable, xargs now correctly restores the file position, even on platforms where exit() does not follow the POSIX rules of doing likewise. Likewise for find (for example, with the -ok action). #20157: Avoid segfault in locate when run as root. This is caused by a buffer overrun, but at this time no exploit mechanism is known. #20139: find -[acm]time -N (wrongly) includes files from N days ago, as well as (correctly) from less than N days ago. #20005: Tests -mtime -n and -mtime +n incorrectly treated like -mtime n. #19948: Fixed an assertion failure on IRIX 6.5 (O_NOFOLLOW is defined to 0 there). #19923: Fixed an array overrun in groups[] array of 'locate' when run by or as root. This bug appears not to be exploitable. If locate is not installed setuid, the bug is not exploitable. For setuid installations, it is conceivable that there could be an information leak if the user uses the -d option or the -e option, though the maintainer has been unable to provoke this on an x86 system. #19871: Typos in find.1 #19871: Spurious .R directives in man page produced error messages from GNU troff. This is now fixed (they are corrected to .B). #19806: The -samefile predicate might get fooled by inode reuse. We now hold open a file descriptor on the reference file to prevent this. #19768: Better detection of corrupted old-style locate databases (e.g. if the database is too short to include a complete bigram table). #19766: The frcode and code programs now detect write errors more reliably. #19658: When cross-compiling, "make clean" no longer deletes the generated file doc/regexprops.texi, because there is no way to regenerate it. #19634: Test suite now passes (again) if "." is on your $PATH. #19619: Findutils builds once again on Cygwin. #19605: Issue an error message (and later return nonzero exit status) if a symbolic link loop was encountered during directory traversal. #19596: Correct the comparison in the find man page and Texinfo manual between %b and %s (the divisor is 512 not 1024). #19484: bigram.c and code.c fail if the first pathname recorded begins with a space #19483: Inconsistent option highlighting in updatedb man page #19416: The result of I/O operations in print-related actions is now checked, and failures are reported. Any failure will cause find's exit status to be nonzero. The predicate itself will continue to return true. #19391: When xargs knows that the system's actual exec limit is larger than the compiled-in ARG_MAX, use the system's limit without generating an assertion failure. #19371: Fix compilation failure on systems which #define open to open64 (and similarly with the close system call). This fixes Savannah bug #19371, affecting AIX 5.3. #18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not field separators. #18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument. #18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+" to just one argument for the time being. There is a performance penalty for doing this. We hope to make a better fix in a later release. #18414: Tests for "find -readable" are skipped for the superuser, as on some systems (e.g. Cygwin with an Administrative user) users can read mode-000 files. #18384: excess bracket in xargs --help #18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning #18222: find -printf '%H %P' once again prints the right result if more than one start point was given on the command line. #18203: A duplicate report of bug #17478. #17782: find -execdir now correctly puts the prefix "./" before the expansion of "{}" rather than at the start of the argument it appears in. Please note that if you use the -exec or -execdir actions with a shell, then you may be vulnerable to shell code injection attacks, so don't do that. It's not a security defect in find - you should not be passing untrusted data (such as file names chosen by other people) to the shell. #17478: Error messages from find can garble the console. #17477: find -printf '%' (that is, where the format has a trailing %) now generates an error message. #17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such as -u+w,a+X). #17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part (see "Functional changes" below) #17372: The fts-based find executable (the default configuration uses fts) is now much faster when -maxdepth is used on filesystems with high fanouts. #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the problem was worse for -exec. #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user whose login shell is not actually a shell. #16378: Assertion failure if stat() returns 00000 as the mode of a file. This apparently can happen occasionally with broken NFS servers. #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct directory name (previously an error message was issued but it specified the wrong directory). #15531: The -prune action now behaves correctly when applied to a file. #15472: Error messages that print ino_t values are no longer truncated on platforms with 64-bit ino_t. #15384: Find misbehaves when parent directory is not readable. #14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an all-zero mask #14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate -i") for multi-byte character environments such as UTF-8. Previously, if your search string contained a character which was outside the single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be returned. ** Documentation Fixes #20873: Indicate that * matches / and leading dot in filenames for "find -path". #18554: Documented the construct -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} + #15360: The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now explained more clearly in the manual page. The locatedb.5 man page now documents the (default) LOCATE02 format more clearly, and also documents the slocate database format. The maximum and default values applying to the -s option of xargs are now documented more clearly in the manual page. ** Compilation Fixes If you configure the source code and then run the tests with "make check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the system binaries. #19416: _FORTIFY_SOURCE warn_unused_result warnings #19948: Assertion failure O_NOFOLLOW != 0 on IRIX 6.5 #19965: Compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0; non-declaration of uintmax_t #19965: Fixed a compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0 (no definition of the type uintmax_t). #19966: Findutils should now build on systems which have the modf() and fabs() functions in the maths library, -lm. This includes some versions of HP-UX and Solaris. #19966: find should link against -lm for modf() and fabs() #19967: Build successfully with C compilers that don't support the GCC construct __attribute__((__noreturn__)). #19967: Use of __attribute((__noreturn__)) makes compilation fail with some non-GCC compilers #19970: Cannot cast from pointer to bool using gnulib's #19970: Compile correctly on C89 systems where the "_Bool" type is not provided, taking into account the limitations of the gnulib replacement for stdbool.h. #19979: Compilation errors on BeOS #19980: Don't use the functions putw() or getw() since these are not in current POSIX. Use the gnulib version of wcwidth() where the system does not provide it. #19981: Don't call setgroups if the function isn't available. #19983: Now compiles on DEC C V5.9-005 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (or at least, should). #20128: Fix compilation error of find/tree.c on AIX with GCC. #20263: Compilation fix for DEC Alpha OSF/1 cc, which forbids the ordering comparison of function pointers. #20594: Allow fine-tuning of the default argument size used by xargs and find at ./configure time. * Major changes in the 4.3.x release series Release notes for the 4.3.x releases follow, though the changes are mostly listed above (except bugfixes for bugs introduced in 4.3.x). The previous stable release was 4.2.33, though 4.3.0 was actually derived from 4.2.27. * Major changes in release 4.3.13, 2008-02-14 ** Bug Fixes #22057: Actually rename the old locate database to the new one atomically, instead of just claiming the rename is atomic in a comment. #22056: -Xtime tests are off by one second (e.g. rm -f x; touch x; find x -mtime 0 should print x). #21960: xargs should collect the exit status of child processes even if the total count of unreaped children has not yet reached the maximum allowed. ** Documentation Fixes Documented various useful techniques with invoking "sh -c" from xargs in the Texinfo documentation. ** Translations Updated the German, Irish, Dutch, Polish and Vietnamese translations. * Major changes in release 4.3.12, 2007-12-19 ** Bug Fixes #15384: Find misbehaves when parent directory is not readable. ** Documentation Fixes More examples in the xargs manual page, including a portable analogue for BSD's "xargs -o". ** Translations Updated translations: Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Vietnamese. * Major changes in release 4.3.11, 2007-12-02 ** Functional changes When the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, "find -perm +a+w" is rejected as invalid. Some other similar mode strings starting with '+' which are not valid in POSIX are also rejected. The -prune action now always evaluates as true (this is also a bugfix). ** Bug Fixes #21568: Switch to checking the gnulib code out with native git, not CVS. This affects mainly those who check findutils code out of CVS. This is not the first time this bug has been fixed (the previous fix used "cvs update -D", which git-cvspserver silently does not support). #21039: Setting the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable now turns off warnings by default, because POSIX requires that only diagnostic messages (and -ok prompts) are printed on STDERR, and diagnostic messages must also result in a nonzero exit status. #20970: Trailing slash on directory arguments breaks -name. "find foo/ -name foo" now correctly matches foo and printf foo/. See POSIX interp http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/uploads/40/14959/AI-186.txt #20865: Using both -delete and -prune without explicitly using -depth is now an error. Traditionally, -delete has always turned -depth on anyway, so this is not a functional change. However, using -depth (implicitly or explicitly) makes -prune a no-op. This change is intended to avoid nasty surprises for people who test with "-print" and then change it to "-delete" when they are happy. #20803: POSIX requires that -prune always returns true. Previously it returned false when -depth was in effect and true otherwise. #20802: If -delete fails, find's exit status will now be non-zero. However, find still skips trying to delete ".". ** Documentation Fixes #21635: Some of the documentation files had missing copying conditions. The missing files now have copying headers, and these are compatible with each other (GNU FDL 1.2). #21634: No copy of FDL 1.2 included with the source code #21633: Missing copyright/license header in some documentation. #21628: find -perm /000 matches all files rather than none, since findutils-4.3.3. The Texinfo documentation is now consistent with the manual page on this point. #21270: Formatting fixes to the xargs.1 manual page, including making options bold instead of italic and making OPTIONS a section header rather than a subsection. * Major changes in release 4.3.10, 2007-11-13 ** Bug Fixes #21568: findutils gnulib code does not match the date in import-gnulib.config. We now check out the gnulib code via git-cvs-pserver. * Major changes in release 4.3.9, 2007-11-11 ** Licensing Findutils version 4.3.9 is released under version 3 of the GNU General Public License. ** Bug Fixes #20834: Avoid segmentation violation for -execdir when $PATH is unset. Assume that the PATH is safe in this situation. #20310: configure uses hosts's support status for "sort -z" when generating the updatedb script for use on the target. This is inappropriate when cross-compiling, so avoid doing that. #20263: Compilation fix for DEC Alpha OSF/1 cc, which forbids the ordering comparison of function pointers. #20139: find -[acm]time -N (wrongly) includes files from N days ago, as well as (correctly) from less than N days ago. #20273: When xargs is successful without consuming all of stdin (for example, with the -E option), and stdin is seekable, xargs now correctly restores the file position, even on platforms where exit() does not follow the POSIX rules of doing likewise. Likewise for find (for example, with the -ok action). #20547: The version information printed by find, xargs, locate, updatedb, frcode and code now complies with the GNU Project's coding standards. #20662: Avoid memory leak in find -name and other places affected by gnulib dirname module. The leak had been present since 4.3.1. #20751: Avoid memory corruption in find -ls that has been present since 4.3.1. #20871: Assertion failure introduced in 4.3.3, when oldfind is invoked in a directory where the parent directory lacks search permission. ** Enhancements #20594: Allow fine-tuning of the default argument size used by xargs and find at ./configure time. #20688: The warning printed by -name or -iname when the pattern to match contains a slash can now be silenced by -nowarn. This warning was originally introduced unconditionally in 4.2.21. Translation of locate --limit problems is improved. POSIX will standardise -path, so the documentation no longer claims that -wholename is the 'canonical' test, and -ipath no longer generates a warning. ** Documentation Fixes Point out more explicitly that the subsecond timestamp support introduced by findutils-4.3.3 introduces a change in the format of several fields. Also explain that when reporting a bug, you should check the most recent findutils release first. Introduced doc/find-maint.texi, a maintenance manual for findutils. Added an extra worked example for find (copying a subset of files). The locate command's manual page now has a HISTORY section. #20951: Very bad/unclear/confusing documentation of security checks in find -execdir #20865: Better documentation on the fact that -delete implies -depth and that -delete interacts badly with -prune. #20552: Fixed typos, formatting and section ordering issues in the find manual page. #20529: removed spurious 'o' in description of "xargs -a" in doc/find.texi. #20232: The --max-database-age option of locate was added in release 4.3.3, but this file (NEWS) did not previously mention this fact. ** Translations Updated Dutch translation. * Major changes in release 4.3.8, 2007-06-12 ** Bug Fixes #20157: Avoid segfault in locate when run as root. This is caused by a buffer overrun, but at this time no exploit mechanism is known. * Major changes in release 4.3.7, 2007-06-09 ** Functional changes Locate can now read old-format locate databases generated on machines with a different byte order. It does this by guessing the byte order, so the result is not completely reliable. If you need to share databases between machines of different architectures, you should use the LOCATE02 format (which has other advantages, as explained in the documentation). ** Security Fixes #20014: Findutils-4.3.7 includes a patch for a potential security problem in locate. When locate read an old-format database, it read file names into a fixed-length buffer allocated on the heap without checking for overflow. Although overflowing a heap buffer is often somewhat safer than overflowing a buffer on the stack, this bug still has potential security implications. This bug also affected the following previous findutils releases: - All releases prior to 4.2.31 - Findutils 4.3.0 to 4.3.6. This bug has been assigned CVE number CVE-2007-2452. ** Bug Fixes #20128: Fix compilation error of find/tree.c on AIX with GCC. #20005: Tests -mtime -n and -mtime +n incorrectly treated like -mtime n. #19983: include_next causes compilation failure in findutils 4.3.6 on non-GCC compilers #19981: Don't call setgroups if the function isn't available. This fixes Savannah bug# 19981. #19980: Don't use the functions putw() or getw() since these are not in current POSIX. Use the gnulib version of wcwidth() where the system does not provide it. #19979: Compilation errors on BeOS #19970: Cannot cast from pointer to bool using gnulib's #19967: Use of __attribute((__noreturn__)) makes compilation fail with some non-GCC compilers #19966: find should link against -lm for modf() and fabs() #19965: Compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0; non-declaration of uintmax_t #19948: Assertion failure O_NOFOLLOW != 0 on IRIX 6.5 #19871: Typos in find.1 #19596: Fixed this bug again, this time in the Texinfo manual (the discussion should compare %b with %s/512, not %s/1024). #19416: _FORTIFY_SOURCE warn_unused_result warnings * Major changes in release 4.3.6, 2007-05-21 ** Bug Fixes #19948: Fixed an assertion failure on IRIX 6.5 (O_NOFOLLOW is defined to 0 there). #19923: Fixed an array overrun in groups[] array of 'locate' when run by or as root. This bug appears not to be exploitable. If locate is not installed setuid, the bug is not exploitable. For setuid installations, it is concievable that there could be an information leak if the user uses the -d option or the -e option, though the maintainer has been unable to provoke this on an x86 system. #19871: Spurious .R directives in manpage produced error messages from GNU troff. This is now fixed (they are corrected to .B). #19416: The result of I/O operations in print-related actions is now checked, and failures are reported. Any failure will cause find's exit status to be nonzero. The predicate itself will continue to return true. ** Compilation Fixes A variety of changes were made to allow compilation to succeed on non-GNU systems. #19983: Now compiles on DEC C V5.9-005 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (or at least, should). #19970: Compile correctly on C89 systems where the "_Bool" type is not provided, taking into account the limitations of the gnulib replacement for stdbool.h. #19967: Build successfully with C compilers that don't support the GCC construct __attribute__((__noreturn__)). #19966: Findutils should now build on systems which have the modf() and fabs() functions in the maths library, -lm. This includes some versions of HP-UX and Solaris. #19965: Fixed a compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0 (no definition of the type uintmax_t). * Major changes in release 4.3.5, 2007-05-05 ** Functional changes Updatedb can now support he generation of file name databases which are compatible with slocate. For some time, GNU locate has been able to read these. The /proc filesystem is excluded from the locate database (by default; change PRUNEPATHS to modify this behaviour). ** Bug Fixes #19806: The -samefile predicate might get fooled by inode reuse. We now hold open a file descriptor on the reference file to prevent this. #19768: Better detection of corrupted old-style locate databases (e.g. if the database is too short to include a complete bigram table). #19766: The frcode and code programs now detect write errors more reliably. #19371: Fix compilation failure on systems which #define open to open64 (and similarly with the close system call). This fixes Savannah bug #19371, affecting AIX 5.3. #19658: When cross-compiling, "make clean" no longer deletes the generated file doc/regexprops.texi, because there is no way to regenerate it. #19391: When xargs knows that the system's actual exec limit is larger than the compiled-in ARG_MAX, use the system's limit without generating an assertion failure. #18203: A duplicate report of bug #17478. #17478: Error messages from find can garble the console. #16378: Assertion failure if stat() returns 00000 as the mode of a file. This apparently can happen occasionally with broken NFS servers. #11668: FreeBSD extensions for time specification are now implemented. In fact, these were included in findutils-4.3.3. The change was listed as a functional change (whcih it is) and this bug report was not mentioned. ** Documentation Fixes The locatedb.5 manpage now documents the (default) LOCATE02 format more clearly, and also documents the slocate database format. The maximum and default values applying to the -s option of xargs are now documented more clearly in the manual page. * Major changes in release 4.3.4, 2007-04-21 ** Bug Fixes #19634: Test suite now passes (again) if "." is on your $PATH. #19619: Findutils builds once again on Cygwin. #19617: Nonexistent start points are (once again) diagnosed in ftsfind. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3. #19616: Fix leaf optimisation and loop detection (which were unreliable in findutils 4.3.3). This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3. #19615: find --version no longer claims to be using FTS_CWDFD when it isn't. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3. #19613: "find -L . -type f" no longer causes an assertion failure when it encounters a symbolic link loop. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3. #19605: Issue an error message (and later return nonzero exit status) if a symbolic link loop was encountered during directory traversal. #19484: bigram.c and code.c fail if the first pathname recorded begins with a space #19483: Inconsistent option highlighting in updatedb manpage #18414: Tests for "find -readable" are skipped for the superuser, as on some systems (e.g. Cygwin with an Administrative user) users can read mode-000 files. ** Translations Findutils 4.3.4 includes a translation for the Ukranian language. * Major changes in release 4.3.3, 2007-04-15 Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15. ** Bug Fixes #19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s (the divisor is 512 not 1024). #18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not field separators. #18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument. #18554: Documented the construct -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} + #18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+" to just one argument for the time being. There is a performance penalty for doing this. We hope to make a better fix in a later release. #18384: excess bracket in xargs --help #18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning #17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such as-u+w,a+X). This change actually occurred in findutils-4.3.2, but the NEWS file for that release didn't mention it. #17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part (see "Functional changes" below) #14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an all-zero mask #14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate -i") for multibyte character environments such as UTF-8. Previously, if your search string contained a character which was outside the single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be returned. ** Functional changes The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S, which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file. The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files. For over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that this change will happen. We now issue a warning indicating that the change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make this change in the 4.2.x series). The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin, -cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second timestamps, including the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments. The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second timestamps: atime ctime mtime %a %c %t %AS %CS %TS %AT %CT %TT %A+ %C+ %T+ %AX %CX %TX The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for files. One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose name id the argument. X and Y can be: a Access time B Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported) c Change time m Modification time t Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison against a file status time, the argument is a time string. Not yet supported. For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if the file being considered was accessed more recently than the reference file was modified. The -newerXY test supports subsecond timestamps where these are available. The X=B variant is not yet implemented. If you configure the source code and then run the tests with "make check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the system binaries. A new option, --max-database-age, has been added to locate. * Major changes in release 4.3.2, 2006-11-25 ** Bug Fixes #18222: find -printf '%H %P' once again prints the right result if more than one start point was given on the command line. #17782: find -execdir now correctly puts the prefix "./" before the expansion of "{}" rather than at the start of the argument it appears in. Please note that if you use the -exec or -execdir actions with a shell, then you may be vulnerable to shell code injection attacks, so don't do that. It's not a security defect in find - you should not be passing untrusted data (such as file names chosen by other people) to the shell. #17490: find -regex generated a segfault in findutils-4.3.1, but this is fixed in findutils-4.3.2. #17477: find -printf '%' (that is, where the format has a trailing %) now generates an error message. #17372: The fts-based find executable (the default configuration uses fts) is now much faster when -maxdepth is used on filesystems with high fanouts. #15531: The -prune action now behaves correctly when applied to a file. ** Functional changes The slocate database format is now supported. Preliminary changes intended to eventually allow setuid operation of locate have also been made. For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a set-user-ID program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please make sure that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate program). Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security mode (at the moment, GNU updatedb will not do this) forces locate's "-e" option to be turned on, which has an effect on the "-S" option which is probably surprising for most users. ** Documentation Fixes The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now explained more clearly in the manual page. Savannah bug #15360. * Major changes in release 4.3.1, 2006-08-06 ** Bug Fixes Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an expression. (Savannah bug #15235). You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines which have missing expressions, such as find . ( ) find . ! find . -a find . \( -not \) find . \( -true -a Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct directory name (previously an error message was issued but it specified the wrong directory). Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the problem was worse for -exec. Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user whose login shell is not actually a shell. There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng Savannah bug #16269). ** Functional changes For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information about find's internal state and progress. The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print"). ** Performance Enhancements Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query optimisation level. To see this in action, try find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z and compare the optimised query with: find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z and find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early if possible). ** Translations Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following languages: Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian * Major changes in release 4.3.0, 2005-12-12 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they may change or go away. All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this release. In addition the following changes are new in this release: ** Functional Changes By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search extremely deep directory hierarchites. You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS". Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts: With fts Without fts default configuration find oldfind configure --with-fts find oldfind configure --without-fts ftsfind find New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file can be read, written or executed respectively. * Major changes in release 4.2.27, 2005-12-06 ** Warnings of Future Changes The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files; this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning message is given if you do this. ** Bug Fixes If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error from the operating system. Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems. On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921). ** Documentation Changes Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are now synchronised. The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although it has existed since release 4.2.5. The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be changed). * Major changes in release 4.2.26, 2005-11-19 ** Public Service Announcements I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details. ** Functional Changes The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows input items to be separated by characters other than null and whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914. Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will not spuriously fail. A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L option, which changes other semantics too). ** Bug Fixes If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now). If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely (even so, the bug is fixed there too). Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory containing 35396 entries. ** Documentation Changes The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test. The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed). The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use "-L -type l". * Major changes in release 4.2.25, 2005-09-03 ** Bug Fixes find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused this to be treated as "find -perm 440". Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis of upper/lower case distinctions. The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file regexprops.texi. Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should also (once again) build on Cygwin. ** Other Changes The test suite for find is now much more extensive. * Major changes in release 4.2.24, 2005-07-29 ** Documentation Changes The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others. The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is now documented. We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting the command's standard input from stdin. Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes were contributed by Aaron Hawley. ** Functional Changes *** Functional changes in locate The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions). Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of locate. The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate. This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option' equivalent. *** Functional changes in find The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not recommended practice however). The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match a newline. The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9 HSFS implementation). ** Bug Fixes *** Bug Fixes for find The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the gnulib version of this function). find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular expressions. If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file. If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time. The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973. * Major changes in release 4.2.23, 2005-06-19 ** Documentation Changes The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should not be). Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir. ** Functional Changes to updatedb File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course is "/" which does work and is not rejected. * Major changes in release 4.2.22, 2005-06-12 ** Security Fixes If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios. ** Other Bug Fixes None in this release. ** Functional Changes to locate A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-', later instances are ignored. A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match one or more patterns. ** Documentation Changes Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k" and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved. * Major changes in release 4.2.21, 2005-06-07 ** Functional Changes to find The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r". Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX. If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing, unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are printed as-is). ** Functional Changes to locate The locate command will now read each locate database at most once. This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a different set of results). A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect. ** Bug Fixes find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again. The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999) The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support the "-s" option, for example Solaris. * Major changes in release 4.2.20, 2005-03-17 ** Internationalization and Localization Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations. ** Bug Fixes Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository, as opposed to those who compile from the source releases. * Major changes in release 4.2.19, 2005-03-07 ** Bug Fixes find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server (Savannah bug #12044). We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic links". "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo when find exits (Savannah bug #12230). If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message. This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems). "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs). ** Functionality Changes "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory. Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085. Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems. ** Documentation enhancements Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters". ** Internationalization and Localization New Vietnamese message translation. * Major changes in release 4.2.18, 2005-02-16 ** Bug Fixes *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15, 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed. *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive NFS servers. ** Documentation improvements *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L. * Major changes in release 4.2.17, 2005-02-08 ** Bug Fixes *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12) *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only) *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /) *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better. *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken in 4.2.15). * Major changes in release 4.2.16, 2005-02-05 ** Functionality Changes *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages. *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs filesystem is. *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto, Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda, Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified). ** Bug Fixes *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the command line. * Major changes in release 4.2.15, 2005-01-29 ** Functionality Changes *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex). *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default. * Major changes in release 4.2.14, 2005-01-25 ** Functionality Changes *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find. ** Bug Fixes *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the distributed tar file more than once. *** Should now build on Solaris once again. *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again ** Documentation improvements *** All options for "locate" are now documented * Major changes in release 4.2.13, 2005-01-23 ** Performance Enhancements *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement, because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement include Mac OS X and *BSD. * Major changes in release 4.2.12, 2005-01-22 ** Functionality Changes *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know. *** -exec ... {} + now works. *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure. *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath". *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate. ** Bug Fixes *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the relevant program will return a non-zero exit status. * Major changes in release 4.2.11, 2004-12-12 ** Bug Fixes *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW. *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a. ** Functionality Changes *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line, or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce a more helpful error message. *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some statistics about the locate databases. *** Implemented the -samefile option. ** Documentation improvements *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations". *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal) ** Bug Fixes *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug prevented this). * Major changes in release 4.2.10, 2004-12-06 ** Bug Fixes *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other systems too. * Major changes in release 4.2.9, 2004-12-05 ** Functionality Changes *** xargs no longer treats a line containing only an underscore as a logical end-of-file. To obtain the behaviour that was previously the default, use "-E_". *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are now deprecated. ** Bug Fixes *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments. Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one for next time. *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued. *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway. ** Documentation improvements *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly. * Major changes in release 4.2.8, 2004-11-24 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in findutils-4.2.8. * Major changes in release 4.2.7, 2004-11-21 ** Functionality Changes *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs''). ** Documentation improvements *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which are not are explained in this chapter. ** Bug Fixes *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or have it. *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled on Solaris). *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally disabled in findutils-4.2.5). * Major changes in release 4.2.6, 2004-11-21 ** Bug Fixes *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount. This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998, #9043. * Major changes in release 4.2.5, 2004-11-11 ** Functionality Changes *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not find will follow symbolic links. *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case it is the default). ** Documentation improvements *** Better documentation for "xargs -i". ** Bug Fixes *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir. (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure"). *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9. *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem. * Major changes in release 4.2.4, 2004-11-08 ** Functionality Changes *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will locate). *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system doesn't support that much). *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled by the use of the -nowarn option. *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0) which changes the result separator from newline to NULL. *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like grep -c). *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want to wait for the entire locate database to be searched. *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour (matching against the whole name of the file including all the parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename. *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to pass extra options through to the find command that it uses. ** Bug Fixes *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on systems that have non-writable string constants. *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the value). *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references * Major changes in release 4.2.3, 2004-10-30 ** Functionality Changes *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches. *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately. *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number. *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names. *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth". *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter; these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test. *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find, the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the directory we've just returned out of). ** Other Changes *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings. * Major changes in release 4.2.2, 2004-10-24 ** Documentation improvements *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported. ** Bug Fixes *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again. ** Other Changes *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used, which means among other things that we only have one config.h file now. *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory. *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers. * Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17 ** Bug Fixes *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard requires it, as explained at http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html * Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17 ** Bug Fixes *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers, as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html) *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t ** Other Changes **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17). * Major changes in release 4.2.0, 2003-06-14 ** Functionality Changes *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive. The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment data contained more than 20480 bytes. *** New options -wholename and -iwholename As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning, though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path). *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored. *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race" silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before find stats the file. There is also an option -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect. ** Documentation improvements *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions The find manual page also now includes a section which describes the relationship between the features of GNU find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements to the find and xargs manual pages have been made. *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented. The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers has been improved. *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented. ** Bug Fixes *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course) *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input, it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the list of files that xargs is trying to read. *** Better support for 64-bit systems. *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect, I think this is a strange thing to want to do. *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing. *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty database if it fails. *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the locate database. *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works This was broken in 4.1.20. * Major changes in release 4.1.20, 2003-06-14: ** New maintainer, James Youngman ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left a gap just in case. ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file README-CVS). ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20. * Major changes in release 4.1.7, 2001-05-20: fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used. security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing. * Major changes in release 4.1.6, 2000-10-10: correct bug in prune. added --ignore-case option for locate * Major changes in release 4.1.5, 2000-04-12: Add support for large files * Major changes in release 4.1.4, 2000-02-26: bug fixes, more up-to-date languages. * Major changes in release 4.1.3, 2000-01-27: added internationalization and localization. * Major changes in release 4.1.2, 2000-01-18: None. * Major changes in release 4.1.1, 1999-08-8: attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb * Major changes in release 4.1, 1994-11-3: ** Distribution renamed to findutils. ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin instead of $exec_prefix/libexec. ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected. * Major changes in release 4.0, 1994-11-2: ** Documentation: *** Texinfo manual. *** Man page for updatedb. *** Man page for the locate database formats. ** find: *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend trees, so it does fewer inode lookups. *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given. *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include and you configure using the --with-afs option. *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE. ** locate: *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the old database format automatically. The new databases are typically 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on some systems. *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old. ** updatedb: *** Takes command-line options. ** xargs: *** Performance improved 10-20%. *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given. *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result. * Major changes in release 3.8, 1993-03-29: ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex: -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type * Major changes in release 3.7: ** locate can search multiple databases ** locate has an option to specify the database path ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail * No NEWS was kept for earlier releases. Known release dates include: ** release 3.2, 1991-08-28 ** release 3.1, 1991-08-21 ** release 3.0, 1991-08-21 ** release 2.2, 1991-04-05 ** release 2.1, 1991-01-01 ** release 2.0, 1990-11-20 ** release 1.2, 1990-07-03 ** release 1.1, 1990-06-24 ** release 1.0, 1990-06-22 ** beginning of findutils history, 1987-02-21 --//-- This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el: LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf Copyright (C) 1996, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 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.