Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
Bug fixes
cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
later, the races are still present on other platforms.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
now fails instead of losing the data.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix= are now no-ops.
[the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
groups inva:lid root no longer exits immediately upon failure.
Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
[bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
[bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
[bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
[bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
[bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
New features
New features
expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
useful for visualizing diff output for example.
ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
format links to files, supported by some terminals.
split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
executing the subsidiary program.
expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
Improvements
mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped
and the reader of the pipe terminates.
tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
is effective in this case.
Bug fixes
New features
New features
Improvements