I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.5.4 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 4.5.x release series is intended to allow people to try out, comment on or contribute to new features of findutils. During the 4.5.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). 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. Please note that the key being used is not the same as the key that was used to sign previous releases. * 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.
