I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.2.26 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 "stable" release of findutils. It can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/findutils. The ftp.gnu.org site is very busy, so you may find it more convenient to download findutils from one of the mirror sites listed at http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html. This release includes a range of changes, including bugfixes, documentation improvements and small functional changes. All the changes since the previous stable 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 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg. 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 Jim Meyering, A Costa, Eirc Blake, Martin Buchholz, Dmitry V. Levin and Bas van Gompel as well as the members of the bug-findutils meilaing list for their help in preparing this release and other recent releases. * Major changes in release 4.2.26 ** Public Service Announcements I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details. ** Functional Changes The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows input items to be separated by characters other than null and whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914. Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will not spuriously fail. A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L option, which changes other semantics too). ** Bug Fixes If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now). If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely (even so, the bug is fixed there too). ** Documentation Changes The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test. The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed). The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use "-L -type l". -- James Youngman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> GNU findutils maintainer _______________________________________________ GNU Announcement mailing list <info-gnu@gnu.org> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu
