I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.3.3 of GNU findutils.
GNU findutils is a set of software tools for finding files that match certain criteria and for performing various operations on them. Findutils includes the programs "find", "xargs" and "locate". More information about findutils is available at http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/. This is a "development" release of findutils. It can be downloaded from ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/findutils. The 4.3.x release series is intended to allow people to try out, comment on or contribute to new features of findutils. During the 4.3.x release series some features may be introduced and then changed or removed as a result of feedback or experience. In short, please don't rely on backward compatibility later in the release series. While this is a development release, it is tested before being released, principally with the regression test suite (run "make check" to use it). The Savannah website (http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils) contains a current list of known bugs in findutils (for both the stable and development branches). This release includes a range of changes, including bugfixes, documentation improvements and small functional changes. All the changes since the previous release are summarised below. Bugs in GNU findutils should be reported to the findutils bug tracker at http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils. Reporting bugs via the web interface will ensure that you are automatically informed when the bug has been fixed. General discussion of findutils takes place on the bug-findutils mailing list. To join the 'bug-findutils' mailing list, send email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. To verify the GPG signature of the release, you will need the public key of the findutils maintainer, James Youngman. You can download this from http://savannah.gnu.org/users/jay. Alternatively, you could query a PGP keyserver, but you will need to use one that can cope with subkeys containing photos. Many older key servers cannot do this. I use subkeys.pgp.net. I think that one works. See also the "Downloading" section of http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/. I would like to thank Eric Blake, Jim Meyering and Andreas Metzler as well as the members of the bug-findutils mailing list for their help in preparing this release. * Major changes in release 4.3.3 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. -- James Youngman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> GNU findutils maintainer _______________________________________________ Bug-findutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-findutils
