I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.5.0 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, and in fact it is the first release in a new development branch. This release is largely similar to the regent stable release 4.4.0 with some changes described below. Findutils 4.5.x 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 4.5.0, 2008-05-21 ** Functional Enhancements to find If the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, the system's definition of "yes" and "no" responses are used to interpret the response to questions from -ok and -okdir. The default is still to use information from the findutils message translations. ** Performance changes The default optimisation level for find is now -O2 instead of -O0, meaning that a number of additional optimisations are performed by default. Current optimisations at each level are: 0: Perform -name, -path, -iname, -ipath before other checks. 1: Expressions containing only cost-free tests are evaluated before expressions which contain more costly tests. 2: Bring forward all tests that need to know the type of a file but don't need to stat it. 3: All tests are ordered by their estimated cost. Cost here is simply an estimate of how time consuming the I/O operations needed to make a test are. ** Bug Fixes #22662: nanoseconds wrongly appended after "PM" for find -printf %AX in locale en_US.UTF-8. 5472: Error messages that print ino_t values are no longer truncated on platforms with 64-bit ino_t. On some systems without support for a boolean type (for example some versions of the AIX C compiler), find's regular expression implementation fails to support case-insensitive regular expression matching, causing -iregex to behave like -regex. This is now fixed. ** Documentation Changes #20873: Indicate that * matches / and leading dot in filenames for "find -path". Both the Texinfo manual and the find manual page now include a more precise description of how your locale configuration affects the interpretation of regular expressions and how your response to prompts from the -ok action are interpreted. -- James Youngman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> GNU findutils maintainer
