findutils-4.11.0

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version.

[Bruce Dubbs]

• Noteworthy changes in release 4.11.0 (2026-07-11) [stable]

Bug Fixes

find no longer crashes when diagnosing a directory cycle (without a symlink being involved pointing to a parent directory). [Bug present since the FTS implementation.]

'find -used' now behaves correctly on OpenBSD 7.8 with difftime(3) underflow bug in the C library (already fixed there) when the access time of a file is identical to its change time.

'find -ignore_readdir_race' now better handles races between FTS reading a directory and visiting its entries when the file or directory was meanwhile removed.

To fix a POSIX compatibility bug, -exec foo Z{} + is no longer a complete predicate, because '+' is only a terminator when it follows an argument which is exactly '{}'. The findutils documentation already states this, and now find's behaviour matches the documentation.

'updatedb.sh' now properly handles the variables for the 'find' and 'frcode' utilities, and hence avoids command injection.

Changes in find

As announced since the release of 4.7.0 (2019) and mandated by POSIX 2024, the behaviour of the -mount option changed: while it was a mere alias for the -xdev option to prevent descending into directories of another device, the -mount option now makes find(1) ignore files on another device, i.e., 'find -mount' will skip the entry of active mount points already. Example, assuming the PROC filesystem is mounted on '/proc':

    $ find / -mount -path /proc -print
    $ find / -xdev -path /proc -print
    /proc

The actions -execdir and -okdir now refuse the '{}' replacement in the zeroth argument of the command to be run. While POSIX allows this for -exec, this is deemed insecure as an attacker could influence which files could be found.

'find -regex' with the default or the 'emacs' regextype now aligns better with Emacs behaviour, and therefore e.g. supports character classes:

    $ touch 123 && find -regex './12[[:digit:]]'
    ./123

find now issues a warning when the punctuation operators '(', ')', '!' and ',' are passed with a leading dash, e.g. '-!'. Future releases will not accept that any more. Accepting that was rather a bug "since the beginning".

Improvements

xargs now gives a better error diagnostic when executing the given command failed.

Documentation Changes

The most recent version of the POSIX standard (IEEE Std 1003.1-2024, also known as The Open Group Base Specifications, Issue 8) has standardised "find -print0" and "xargs -0". Our documentation now points this out. Similarly for 'find -iname'.

The code example for "Finding the Shallowest Instance" in the Texinfo manual and the corresponding one in the EXAMPLES section in the find.1 man page have been fixed.

Translators contributed numerous fixes for issues in the find.1 man page.

The list of actions that suppress the default -print action has been supplemented with the missing '-print0' and '-fprint0' actions.

The manual pages have been updated to give better and/or more consistent output with manpage formatters other than GNU roff.

Translations

Updated the following translations: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese (simplified), Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Indonesian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.

Future Changes

A future release will remove the warning message find prints about the 2007 change in the meaning of "-perm /000". Everybody who is likely to care probably knows about this change by now.