GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout) * Major changes in release 4.2.15 ** 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. ** Functionality Changes * Major changes in release 4.2.14 ** 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 ** 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 ** 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 ** 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 ** 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 ** 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 *** 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 ** 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 ** 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 ** 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 ** 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 ** 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 ** 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 ** 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 ** 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 ** 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: ** 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: 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: correct bug in prune. added --ignore-case option for locate * Major changes in release 4.1.5: Add support for large files * Major changes in release 4.1.4: bug fixes, more up-to-date languages. * Major changes in release 4.1.3: added internationalization and localization. * Major changes in release 4.1.1: 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: ** 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: ** 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: ** 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 --//-- 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