I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.5.11 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 4.5.11, 2013-02-02 ** Documentation Changes The Texinfo manual and the find manual pafe now explain why two find binaries (either 'find' and 'oldfind', or 'find' and 'ftsfind') are installed. A manual page for either ftsfind or oldfind is also installed, whichever is appropriate. ** Bug Fixes #34079: Apply gnulib ftw memory fix #33384: If rm/chmod etc. are not in /bin or /usr/bin, updatedb fails #18227: find -ls does not display device major/minor numbers. #29698: Correct and clarify documentation of xargs -d option #32887: Present xargs options alphabetically like in GNU cp(1) etc #14386: updatedb relies on mktemp, which is not portable. #32043: find -name [ doesn't obey posix #37926: The -inum predicate previously gave wrong results in oldfind (ftsfind, the default find binary, was unaffected). ** Functional Changes to xargs If no utility is specified, xargs now calls "echo" (and searches on $PATH to find it) rather than "/bin/echo". This may give rise to subtle behaviour differences for some users. To avoid unexpected surprises, just explicitly specify the utility you would like to run. For example use "xargs /bin/echo < foo" rather than "xargs < foo". A new option is provided, --process-slot-var. If you set this, xargs will set the indicated environment variable in each child. The values are re-used, but no executing child process will have the same value as another executing child process. This wishlist item was Savannah bug #29512. ** Functional Changes to find For find -printf, the format specifiers %{, %[ and %( are all now reserved for future use. Previously these would print {, [ and ( respectively, but in any case those characters can just be printed literally like this: find -printf "{[(". Code changes intended to explain that these are reserved went into findutils-4.5.5, but this code had, before now, had no effect. When expanding "-printf '%F'", find reads /etc/mtab. We now take the last match found in this file, rather than the first, to better deal with implementations which have duplicate entries (for example /proc/mounts on systems running the Linux kernel). Both oldfind and ftsfind now use less heap memory when processing directories containing very many files. However, oldfind now uses one file descriptor per recursive subdirectory level, which will further limit the depth of directory trees it can search. If you need find to be able to search deep directory trees, use ftsfind (this is, by default the binary built and installed as 'find'). The behaviour of the "awk", "posix-awk" and "gnu-awk" regular expression types selected by the -regextype option have slightly changed, to bring them into line with the behaviour of the GNU C library. For "awk", character classes (such as [[:digit:]]) are now supported. For "gnu-awk" and "posix-awk", intervals are supported and invalid interval specifcations are treated as literals (for example 'a{1' is treated as 'a\{1'). -- James Youngman <[email protected]> GNU findutils maintainer
