each coreutils release is known to have regressions. so please test it carefully. it's in testing for both arches. -Andy GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*- * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable] ** Bug fixes configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works. "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90] dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h] id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in much better performance when there are many users and/or groups. ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer. md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g., echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0] md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..." and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file, and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail. Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too. [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995] "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x" mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed. mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename, when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0] "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2, stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992] "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap [bug present in the original version, in 1992] "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them) at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F), --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S). "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192). "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure in more cases when a directory is empty. "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted" rather than reporting the invalid string format. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0] ** New features join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can be turned off with the --nocheck-order option. sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n and --random-sort/-R, resp. ** Improvements id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument. ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats. ** Portability rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku, which have negative errno values. ** Consistency install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout, not to stderr.