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GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout) * Noteworthy changes in release 4.8.0 (2020-01-09) [stable] ** Changes in xargs 'xargs -t' no longer outputs a trailing blank to stderr after the last argument of each constructed command line to be executed. [#57291] xargs now warns when more than one of the conflicting options --max-lines (-L, -l), --replace (-i/-I) and --max-args (-n) are specified on the command line. [#52137] ** Bug Fixes find no longer crashes when an XFS filesystem is heavily changed during the run. Discussed at: <https://lists.gnu.org/r/bug-gnulib/2020-04/msg00068.html> find -used works again. This predicate was not working properly since adding the support for sub-second timestamp resolution for various predicates in FINDUTILS_4_3_3-1 back in 2007. Discussed at: <https://lists.gnu.org/r/bug-findutils/2019-11/msg00010.html> ** Improvements 'find -D exec' now diagnoses all -exec, -execdir, -ok and -okdir runs including the call arguments and the exit code of the launched process. [#59083] ** Documentation Changes The documentation of 'find -printf %Ak' has been improved: it now refers to the strftime(3) documentation for a complete list of supported conversion specifiers, and documents the 'F' conversion specifier ('yyyy-mm-dd'). The man pages (find.1, locate.1, locatedb.5, updatedb.1, and xargs.1) now consistently end with the sections "REPORTING BUGS", "COPYRIGHT" and "SEE ALSO", with the latter referring to the online page on the GNU web server. The "EXAMPLES" section in the find.1 man page now shows the examples in a better structure and uses consistent formatting. Various man page fixes - syntax issues and typos. [#59745, #59330, #59012, #58193, #57807, #57775] Other documentation changes: #58654: doc: clarify that 'find -perm +MODE' is unrelated to umask #58458: doc: improve section 'Hard links', especially fix the description regarding 'find -L -samefile FILE'. #58205: find.1: clarify double dash '--' option #58149: 'xargs --help' now mentions that --replace (-I, -i) splits the input at newline characters. #57025: doc: enhance description of tests accepting numeric arguments in find.1 [see also #49640]. #54730: Add additional valuable example of find -quit #48135: Fix testsuite error on Hurd and BSD related to ln #35253: Clarify descriptions of -printf %f, %h. ** Changes to the build process The configure option --without-fts has been removed. The attempt to use it stopped configure with an error message since 4.5.18 (2015) anyway. * Major changes in release 4.7.0, 2019-08-29 ** Changes to locate / updatedb Support for generating old-format databases (with updatedb --old-format or updatedb --dbformat=old) has been removed. The old database format was deprecated in 2007 (and updatedb has warned about this since that time). The locate program will will read old-format databases, though this support also will be removed. The updatedb script now operates in the C locale only. This means that character encoding issues are now not likely to cause sort to fail. It also honours the TMPDIR environment variable if that was set, and no longer sorts file names case-insensitively. The (unspecified) order in which filenames are stored in the locate database is now different to previous versions. However, you should not rely on locate's output appearing in any particular order in any case. ** Improvements All utilities now only show the full usage text when requested via the --help option. Previously, when the user passed invalid options or arguments, the user's attention to the corresponding error diagnostic was distracted by that lengthy text. find now accepts multiple file type arguments to the -type and -xtype options separated by comma ','. For example, to search for symbolic links and directories simply provide the shorter '-type l,d' instead of the - yet more portable - '( -type l -o -type d )'. find now diagnoses failures returned by readdir(). This bug was inherent in the use of FTS. find now exits in more cases immediately after the error diagnostic, i.e., without the following usage text, to make the former more eye-catching. find now outputs a better hint in case the user passed an unquoted shell- glob pattern to options like -name, i.e., when the offending argument is an existing file. find now supports the debug option '-D all' to include all of the other debug options at once. xargs now supports the -o, --open-tty option to reopen stdin as /dev/tty in the child process before executing the command; useful to run an interactive application. Added for compatibility with BSD. xargs now supports the GNU_FINDUTILS_FD_LEAK_CHECK environment variable to enable/disable fd leak check. 'xargs -t' (--verbose) now properly quotes each part of the command to the executed if needed when printing it to stderr; likewise -p (--interactive). ** Documentation Changes Prefer https:// over http:// links where possible, e.g. for '*.gnu.org' servers. Both find.1 and the find texinfo manual now consistently document all of the 'N', 'L' and '?' possibilities in '-printf %Y' output when the determination of the type of a symlink target fails. find.1 now correctly states the -prune has no effect when the -depth option is given. Before, it wrongly stated that -prune would return false in that case. Some minor documentation improvements are listed in "Bug Fixes" below. ** Bug Fixes #56820: find: improve diagnostic when a global option like -maxdepth is specified after another argument like a test, thus hopefully avoiding translation issues (at least French, German). #56142: doc: fix bug #56142 by specifying which actions inhibit the default -print. #55272: find: improve diagnostic when -name or -iname is used with a pattern containing a directory separator ('/'), suggesting to use -wholename or -iwholename respectively. #54859: doc: fix typo in 'xargs -l' examples in texinfo manual. Change from 'xargs -1' (minus one) to 'xargs -l' (minus El) in 3 places. #54838: doc: fix the examples of the -perm option in the texinfo documentation. The example '-perm -g+w,o+w' was misplaced. Bug present since FINDUTILS_4_2_27-1. #54262: 'find -printf "%Y"' now correctly outputs 'N' for broken symlinks (ENOENT or ENOTDIR). Previously, it output 'l' in such a case. Bug introduced while attempting to fix #29460 in version v4.5.8. #54171: 'find -depth' now outputs the name of unreadable directories. Previously, FTS-based find missed to output those entries. Bug present since the FTS implementation in FINDUTILS_4_3_0-1. #52981: find: the '-delete' action no longer complains about disappeared files when the '-ignore_readdir_race' option is given, too. That action will also returns true in such a case now. #52220: 'find -D' without any further argument no longer crashes. Bug present since the implementation of -D in FINDUTILS_4_3_1-1. #51304: doc: use correct IEC unit prefixes in the documentation of 'find -size'. find(1) uses binary-based units for the suffixes 'k', 'M', and 'G' of the argument of the '-size' option: 1024, 1024*1024 and 1024^3. Therefore, the documentation should use the correct IEC prefixes kibibyte, mebibyte and gibibyte respectively (or their abbreviations 'KiB', 'MiB' and 'GiB'). #50758: doc: fix the description of the -perm examples matching the permission mode "022" in find's texinfo manual: the match is for the file's group and 'other' mode bits instead of for user and group. Bug introduced when adding the -perm examples in FINDUTILS-4.2.11. #50326: find no longer leaks memory for a recently added member in gnulib's mount list structure. #50259: find -printf '%h' now outputs the correct path for arguments with one or more trailing slashes. Previously, it would e.g. output "foo" instead of "." when "foo/" was passed; likewise, it would output "/user/xxx/" instead of "/user" when "/user/xxx//" was passed. Bug introduced in FINDUTILS-4.2.19. #48180: find -noop (an internal option not intended to be exposed to the user) no longer crashes. Bug introduced in FINDUTILS-4.3.1. #48030: find -exec + does not pass all arguments for certain specific filename lengths. After the internal (usually 128k) buffer is full and find(1) executed the given command with these arguments, it would miss to run the command yet another time if only one other file argument has to be processed. Bug introduced in FINDUTILS-4.2.12. #46784: frcode drops last char if no final newline ** Changes to the build process The configure option --enable-id-cache has been removed. It has been a no-op since findnutils-4.5.15. The configure option --enable-debug has been removed. Debugging in find is now controlled by its -D option only. The configure option --enable-silent-rules is the default now. Use --disable-silent-rules or "make V=1" to get verbose build output. "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files. xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing only .tar.xz files is enough. Maintainer builds from the Git repository now derive the version string from the version control system instead of using a fixed string (changed after each release manually). As a result, the inter-release builds can now be distinguished: e.g. "4.6.0.152-fe9c" is the 152th commit after the tag "v4.6.0" and has the Git short hash "fe9c". Builds from an unclean tree are marked with the suffix "-dirty". The translation files in the PO directory are no longer version controlled; instead bootstrap auto-updates them from "translationproject.org" during a maintainer build. A shell-style test framework borrowed from GNU coreutils has been added. This allows better tests with more control over stdin, stdout, stderr, signals, preparatory steps, cleanup, return code verification, root-only tests, etc. * Major changes in release 4.6.0, 2015-12-28 ** Stable Release This is the first stable release since findutils-4.4.2. The entries below in this file detail the changes that have occurred since release 4.3.13 (which is the common ancestor of this release and findutils-4.4.0). This release includes all the bug fixes incorporated into the 4.4.x release series, since those bug fixes were also applied to the 4.5.x release series. ** Summary of Changes The most significant changes since the 4.4.2 release are: 1. Some backward-incompatible changes have been made to find: - egrep regular expressions now work like GNU grep -E - Minor changes to the way nanoseconds fields are printed - find -perm +mode is now fully POSIX compliant (if you want the old behaviour use -perm /mode). - find -perm +numeric_mode is not supported any more. This syntax is unspecified by POSIX. The prior functionality continues to be available with -perm /numeric_mode. For more details see Savannah bug #38474. 2. Some backward-incompatible changes have been made to xargs: - if the child exits with status 126 or 127, xargs exits with status 123. 3. There are also a large number of bugfixes, performance enhancements and documentation improvements, as detailed below. 4. The "oldfind" binary is no longer installed. ** Translations Updated the Danish translation. * Major changes in release 4.5.19, 2015-12-28 ** Bug Fixes: Applied patch #8688: Spelling fixes. * Major changes in release 4.5.18, 2015-12-27 ** Changes to find Only the ftsfind binary will be installed, as "find". Installing oldfind, under any name, is no longer supported. The configure option --with-fts is still allowed, but trying to use it to enable the installation of oldfind (for example by using --with-fts=no) results in configure stopping with an error message. ** Translations Updated the Slovenian translation. * Major changes in release 4.5.17, 2015-12-24 ** Future Changes to Release Signing Keys Future findutils releases will be signed with a new GPG key, though this release will be signed with the existing key. Here are the old and new key fingerprints: pub 1024R/64A95EE5 1996-04-04 Key fingerprint = 0C 1C D7 CA 66 33 D2 E9 14 E0 5F 16 D5 24 60 E9 uid James Youngman <jay@gnu.org> uid James Youngman <JYoungman@vggas.com> pub 4096R/C5DDACB9 2015-12-24 Key fingerprint = 0CF4 E8D8 7159 3224 8428 32B8 88DD 9E08 C5DD ACB9 uid James Youngman <james@youngman.org> uid James Youngman <jay@gnu.org> sub 4096R/771CE15D 2015-12-24 ** Functional changes to find When the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, a warning is no longer issued when '/' is found in the argument to -name. Use of POSIXLY_CORRECT also turns off warnings about use of the deprecated option -d and the use of global options in surprising positions. ** Documentation Changes The EXPRESSION section of the find manpage is now organised somewhat more clearly. The -regextype option is now correctly documented as being positional. ** Bug Fixes: When the -a option of xargs is used, xargs no longer leaks a file descriptor (fixing a bug reported by Kyle Sallee). ** Translations Updated the Brazilian Portuguese and Serbian translations. * Major changes in release 4.5.16, 2015-12-23 ** Functional Changes to find Using -regextype egrep now has the same effect as -regextype posix-egrep. This is the result of a change to gnulib to bring it into line with GNU grep (see https://debbugs.gnu.org/20974#22). ** Translations Updated translations: Estonian, Swedish, Polish, Vietnamese, Ukranian, Norwegian Bokmaal, Czech, Russian, French, Hungarian. ** Bug Fixes: #46715: testsuite error with perl 5.22, gnulib outdated #40146: gnulib revision doesn't support musl libc * Major changes in release 4.5.15, 2015-12-18 ** Bug Fixes #45780: inode column is badly aligned when running 'find <dir> -ls' #45585: unclear description of -newerXY in manual page. #45505: give a more explicit error message when the argument to -regex is not a valid regular expression. #45090: oldfind incorrectly omits test/..test (or any file whose name begins with ..). #45065: find incorrectly prints a leading zero on the fractional part of ctime timestamps #45064: Use of [[ ... ]] in /bin/sh script is incorrect #45062: Enabling CACHE_IDS causes segfaults (this bug affects many historic releases, probably since release 3.0 in 1991). You would not have been affected by this problem unless you used the option --enable-id-cache when invoking confgure. #42903: checklists.py now supports Python 3. #40805: The locatedb manual page uses now troff symbols where appropriate. ** Translations Updated the German translation. * Major changes in release 4.5.14, 2014-07-19 ** Bug Fixes #42793: "Failed to write output" with -ls (this bug affected only release 4.5.13). * Major changes in release 4.5.13, 2014-07-16 ** Documentation Changes Some minor documentation improvements are listed in "Bug Fixes" below. ** Bug Fixes #40339: Fix leaked directory handle when listing mounted file systems. #40094: The xargs --help output has a small number of cosmetic improvements. #39197: Small fix to find's manual page to remove an unwanted backslash, which made the troff incompatible with Eric Raymond's doclifter software. #39162: -printf reads beyond arguments terminated by \ #35753: Check the success/failure of material I/O operations where these are important to the use of the output (i.e. check the output for "find -ok" but not debugging output). #31005: The find manual page and Texinfo manual now more clearly state that -exec ... + always returns true. ** Translations Updated translations: Estonian, Polish, Ukranian. * Major changes in release 4.5.12, 2013-09-22 ** Functional Changes to find The GNU extension "find ... -perm /MODE" is no longer disabled when the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set. The obsolete GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE", which was withdrawn in release 4.2.21 in 2005 due to compatibility problems, has been completely removed. Use "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. ** Documentation Changes If you use -type or -xtype with a type letter corresponding to a file type which is not supported by the system on which find was compiled, find will now give a clearer error message (though the functionality is unchanged). Type letters are affected are D, l and p (for Solaris Doors, symbolic links and named pipes respectively). The output of xargs --help has been slightly changed for greater clarity. The documentation for xargs now warns about parallel processes (xargs -P) sharing stdout. The documentation for find -execdir now describes correctly that the command will be executed in the same directory as the file we were considering at the time. The documentation previously (and incorrectly) stated that the original working directory of find would be used. ** Bug Fixes Some bugs in 4.5.11 were fixed without adding them to the bug database, though they are in the ChangeLog: *** Use of [[ ... ]] in find/testsuite/sv-bug-32043.sh *** Don't delete header files in "lib/" for "make clean". *** xargs: wait for process before prompting in interactive mode (-p) These following fixed bugs are recorded at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils: #40088: potential buffer overflow in -execdir and -okdir #39324: exits without error on OOM #38583: errno-buffer read failed in xargs_do_exec #38474: Unintended (?) behaviour change of -perm +mode predicate #36652: Better document that -0/-d turns off the effect of -E. #34976: find -execdir leaks file descriptors for the working directory * Major changes in release 4.5.11, 2013-02-02 ** Documentation Changes The Texinfo manual and the find manual pafe now explain why two find binaries (either 'find' and 'oldfind', or 'find' and 'ftsfind') are installed. A manual page for either ftsfind or oldfind is also installed, whichever is appropriate. ** Bug Fixes #34079: Apply gnulib ftw memory fix #33384: If rm/chmod etc. are not in /bin or /usr/bin, updatedb fails #18227: find -ls does not display device major/minor numbers. #29698: Correct and clarify documentation of xargs -d option #32887: Present xargs options alphabetically like in GNU cp(1) etc #14386: updatedb relies on mktemp, which is not portable. #32043: find -name [ doesn't obey posix #37926: The -inum predicate previously gave wrong results in oldfind (ftsfind, the default find binary, was unaffected). ** Functional Changes to xargs If no utility is specified, xargs now calls "echo" (and searches on $PATH to find it) rather than "/bin/echo". This may give rise to subtle behaviour differences for some users. To avoid unexpected surprises, just explicitly specify the utility you would like to run. For example use "xargs /bin/echo < foo" rather than "xargs < foo". A new option is provided, --process-slot-var. If you set this, xargs will set the indicated environment variable in each child. The values are re-used, but no executing child process will have the same value as another executing child process. This wishlist item was Savannah bug #29512. ** Functional Changes to find For find -printf, the format specifiers %{, %[ and %( are all now reserved for future use. Previously these would print {, [ and ( respectively, but in any case those characters can just be printed literally like this: find -printf "{[(". Code changes intended to explain that these are reserved went into findutils-4.5.5, but this code had, before now, had no effect. When expanding "-printf '%F'", find reads /etc/mtab. We now take the last match found in this file, rather than the first, to better deal with implementations which have duplicate entries (for example /proc/mounts on systems running the Linux kernel). Both oldfind and ftsfind now use less heap memory when processing directories containing very many files. However, oldfind now uses one file descriptor per recursive subdirectory level, which will further limit the depth of directory trees it can search. If you need find to be able to search deep directory trees, use ftsfind (this is, by default the binary built and installed as 'find'). The behaviour of the "awk", "posix-awk" and "gnu-awk" regular expression types selected by the -regextype option have slightly changed, to bring them into line with the behaviour of the GNU C library. For "awk", character classes (such as [[:digit:]]) are now supported. For "gnu-awk" and "posix-awk", intervals are supported and invalid interval specifcations are treated as literals (for example 'a{1' is treated as 'a\{1'). * Major changes in release 4.5.10, 2011-05-11 ** Documentation Changes The manual now includes a small number of references to further reading on security. ** Bug Fixes #30608: Automagic dependency on selinux. The configure script now provides a --without-selinux option. #29949: find -execdir does not change working directory #31359: test-strstr unit test fails on alpha. #30777: find -exec echo TURNIP{} \+ is accepted but TURNIP is eaten #30180: error message from incorrect -size option is off #29828: test suite deadlock on FreeBSD. ** Translations Updated translations: Finnish, Italian, Danish, Slovenian, German, Estonian, French, Japanese, Danish. * Major changes in release 4.5.9, 2010-04-29 ** Bug Fixes #29593: Make import-gnulib.sh work under a POSIX shell. #29511: fails to build on kfreebsd-* #27563: -L breaks -execdir #19593: -execdir .... {} + has suboptimal performance (see below) ** Translations Updated translations: Chinese (simplified). ** 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). ** Functional enhancements to xargs You can now increase the parallelism of xargs in mid-run by sending it SIGUSR1, and decrease the parallelism with SIGUSR2. * Major changes in release 4.5.8, 2010-04-07 ** Bug Fixes #29460: -printf %Y fails in $CWD-dependent way #27974: Use gnulib's xreadlinkat support #29435: fd_is_cloexec does not work on Fedora buildhosts #27221: symlink_loop check broken by FTS_CWDFD #27213: avoid failed assertions for non-executable directories. ** Translations Updated Vietnamese, Czech, Dutch, Polish, Russian translations. * Major changes in release 4.5.7, 2010-04-03 ** Performance changes If you use the -fstype FOO predicate and specify a filsystem type FOO which is not known (e.g. present in /etc/mtab) at the time find starts, that predicate is now equivalent to -false. This substitution currently occurs at optimisation level 2 and above. ** Translations Copyright headers in the translation files have been updated. Some additional messages have been marked for translation. However, there have not been any changes to translation text. The main purpose of this release is to provide a base for updated translations. * Major changes in release 4.5.6b, 2010-03-30 This is a replacement release for 4.5.6, which is not available by FTP since it contains Makefiles which are vulnerable to CVE-2009-4029. * Major changes in release 4.5.6, 2010-03-30 ** Functional Enhancements to find patch #4848: Patch - Support for SELinux ** Bug Fixes #29089: SELinux --context and %Z options #28872: Mistake in "#safer" example in "Problems with -exec and filenames" section of the Texinfo manual. #28824: Corrected error message for "-ctime x". Likewise for -gid, -inum, -links, -mmin, -cmin, -amin, -uid, -used, -atime, -mtime, -ctime. #27975: Infinite loop for -exec [..] {} +. #27846: Assertion failure in xargs.c on AIX. #27375: Open file descriptors leak into child processes. #27017: find -D opt / -fstype ext3 -print , -quit coredumps #27328: segfault if the initial exec for "find -exec" fails. #27017: find -D opt / -fstype ext3 -print , -quit coredumps. #26868: compilation error in pred.c on Solaris x86_64 #24873: Duplicate fprint option corrupts output #23920: warn about un-matchable -path arguments ending in /. #19120: Patch to fix single quotes in man page find(1) ** Documentation Changes #26327: xargs man page is vague about the number of times command is executed. * Major changes in release 4.5.5, 2009-07-06 xargs now handles the case where the system's actual exec limits are smaller than the value of ARG_MAX at compile time. Very few platforms normally have this property, but it is possible to configure some Unix systems this way. ** Bug Fixes #25359: files/testsuite/find.gnu/posix-h.exp tests fail #26587: Fix a typo in -execdir documentation (it says -exec by mistake in the text). #26537: find -prune now makes sure it has valid stat() information. #22708: Exit status 126 and 127 from the utility invoked from xargs now makes xargs return 123, meaning that exit status values 126 and 127 now unambigously mean that the utility could not be run or could not be found, respectively. ** Documentation Changes The -wholename option to find is no longer preferred over -ipath. * Major changes in release 4.5.4, 2009-03-10 ** Performance changes The ftsfind executable (which is built by default as "find") now calls fts() in such a way that it avoids calling stat() on directory entries, if it doesn't need the information. This can produce a significant speedup on filesystems which don't populate the d_type element of struct dirent, for example reiserfs. Anecdotal evidence suggests this can speed updatedb up from about 30 minutes to 3-4 minutes. The ftsfind executable also now avoids calling stat() functions to discover the inode number of a file, if we already read this information from the directory. This does provide a speed-up, but only for a restricted set of commands such as "find . -inum 4001". This fix is listed below as bug #24342. ** Bug Fixes #25764: remove duplicate entry for 'proc' in updatedb's $PRUNEFS. #25359: find -H wrongly behaves like -L sometimes; this bug affects only filesystems which populate d_type and affects -type and -printf %y. This does not affect the default behaviour of find or find -P. #25144: Misleading error message when argument to find -user is an unknown user or is missing. #25154: Allow compilation with C compilers that don't allow declarations to follow statements. #24342: -inum predicate shoud use dirent.d_ino instead of stat.st_ino (this is a performance bug). ** Translations Updated translations for Bulgarian, German, Irish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukranian, Vietnamese. ** Documentation Changes The file README-CVS has been renamed to README-hacking and improved. * Major changes in release 4.5.3, 2008-12-07 ** Bug Fixes #24283: find-4.5.2 -printf %TY causes NULL pointer dereference ** Performance changes Changes to gnulib's fts code should provide performance improvements in find when processing very large directories (for example directories containing significantly more than 10000 filenames). Performance imporvements may only exist for some find command lines (performance testing was done for the fts implementation itself but we haven't done the analogous performance tests in find). File type information is also passed back from fts to find, saving calls to the stat system call for find command lines which don't need the stat information. This provides a performance improvement for common cases like "find . -type d". * Major changes in release 4.5.2, 2008-09-07 ** Bug Fixes #24169: find would segfault if the -newerXY test was not followed by any argument. #23996: integer overflow on some platforms when parsing "-used 3". ** Documentation Enhancements #23070: Corrected manpage description of find -perm /000 (the change was already made but the manpage indicated the change would happen "soon"). ** Translations Updated translation: French, Indonesian. New translation: Czech. * Major changes in release 4.5.1, 2008-06-21 ** Bug Fixes #22662: find -printf %AX appends nanoseconds in the right place now. #23663: crash in some locales for -printf %AX (this problem seems to have affected only the CVS code, and not any public releases). ** Translations New translation: Lithuanian. Updated translations: Chinese (simplified). ** Documentation Enhancements Added a worked example describing how to find the shallowest instances of a given directory name (or names) in a directory hierarchy. * Major changes in release 4.5.0, 2008-05-21 ** 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. ** Enhancements If xargs find that exec fails because the argument size limit it calculated is larger than the system's actual maximum, it now adapts by passing fewer arguments (as opposed to failing). ** Performance changes The default optimisation level for find is now -O2 instead of -O0, meaning that a number of additional optimisations are performed by default. Current optimisations at each level are: 0: Perform -name, -path, -iname, -ipath before other checks. 1: Expressions containing only cost-free tests are evaluated before expressions which contain more costly tests. 2: Bring forward all tests that need to know the type of a file but don't need to stat it. 3: All tests are ordered by their estimated cost. Cost here is simply an estimate of how time consuming the I/O operations needed to make a test are. ** Bug Fixes #22662: nanoseconds wrongly appended after "PM" for find -printf %AX in locale en_US.UTF-8. #15472: Error messages that print ino_t values are no longer truncated on platforms with 64-bit ino_t. 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. ** Documentation Changes #20873: Indicate that * matches / and leading dot in filenames for "find -path". 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. * 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 <stdbool.h> #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 $PATH. #19619: Findutils builds once again on Cygwin. #19617: Nonexistent start points are (once again) diagnosed in ftsfind. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3. #19616: Fix leaf optimisation and loop detection (which were unreliable in findutils 4.3.3). This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3. #19615: find --version no longer claims to be using FTS_CWDFD when it isn't. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3. #19613: "find -L . -type f" no longer causes an assertion failure when it encounters a symbolic link loop. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3. #19605: Issue an error message (and later return nonzero exit status) if a symbolic link loop was encountered during directory traversal. #19484: bigram.c and code.c fail if the first pathname recorded begins with a space #19483: Inconsistent option highlighting in updatedb manpage #18414: Tests for "find -readable" are skipped for the superuser, as on some systems (e.g. Cygwin with an Administrative user) users can read mode-000 files. ** Translations Findutils 4.3.4 includes a translation for the Ukrainian language. * Major changes in release 4.3.3, 2007-04-15 Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15. ** Bug Fixes #19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s (the divisor is 512 not 1024). #18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not field separators. #18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument. #18554: Documented the construct -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" 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 https://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 https://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 <jay@gnu.org> ** 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) 1996-2021 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 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.