I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.2.25 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 both bugfixes and small functional changes. All the changes since the previous stable release are summarised below. The principal change between findutils-4.2.23 and findutils-4.2.25 is that the regular expression support in "find" is now once again compatible with the traditional behaviour (that is, GNU Emacs-style regular expression syntax). Alternative regular expression syntaxes can be selected at runtime; indeed you can use more than one different syntax in the same command line. See below for details. 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/. * Major changes in release 4.2.25 ** Bug Fixes find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused this to be treated as "find -perm 440". Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis of upper/lower case distinctions. The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file regexprops.texi. Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should also (once again) build on Cygwin. ** Other Changes The test suite for find is now much more extensive. * 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 feature 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 count 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 -printf 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 _______________________________________________ GNU Announcement mailing list <[email protected]> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu
