I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.2.24 of GNU findutils. This is a bugfix release; the list of bugs fixes appears below.
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". This is an "unstable" release of findutils. It includes a range of changes, including both bugfixes and functional changes. It can be downloaded from ftp://alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/findutils. The current stable release of findutils is still 4.2.23, which is available from ftp.gnu.org and its mirrors. However, the next release of findutils will replace findutils-4.2.23 as the stable release; you should note in particular that the behaviour of regular expressions in findutils-4.2.24 is different to 4.2.23; essentially the old behaviour has been restored but it is now much better documented. More information about findutils is available at http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/. 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 particularly like to thank Aaron Hawley for his recent help with the documentation. * Major changes in release 4.2.24 ** Documentation Changes The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others. The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is now documented. We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting the command's standard input from stdin. Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes were contributed by Aaron Hawley. ** Functional Changes *** Functional changes in locate The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions). Since this featrue is releatively new anyway, I though it was more useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of locate. The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate. This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option' equivalent. *** Functional changes in find The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not recommended practice however). The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match a newline. The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for the link cound on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9 HSFS implementation). ** Bug Fixes *** Bug Fixes for find The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the gnulib version of this function). find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular expressions. If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file. If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time. The "%Y" directive for the -orintf action now no longer changes find's idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973. -- James Youngman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> GNU findutils maintainer _______________________________________________ Bug-findutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-findutils
