GNU findutils 4.3.3 is now available on alpha.gnu.org

[James Youngman]

I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.3.3 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 4.3.x release series is
intended to allow people to try out, comment on or contribute to new
features of findutils.  During the 4.3.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).

This release includes a range of changes, including bugfixes,
documentation improvements and small functional changes.  All the
changes since the previous 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 <address@hidden>.

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.  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 Eric Blake, Jim Meyering and Andreas Metzler
as well as the members of the bug-findutils mailing list for their
help in preparing this release.

* Major changes in release 4.3.3

Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15.

** Bug Fixes

#19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s
(the divisor is 512 not 1024).

#18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not
field separators.

#18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input
line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument.

#18554: Documented the construct  -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} +

#18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+"
to just one argument for the time being.  There is a performance
penalty for doing this.  We hope to make a better fix in a later
release.

#18384: excess bracket in xargs --help

#18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning

#17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such
as-u+w,a+X).  This change actually occurred in findutils-4.3.2, but
the NEWS file for that release didn't mention it.

#17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part
(see "Functional changes" below)

#14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an
all-zero mask

#14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate
-i") for multibyte character environments such as UTF-8.  Previously,
if your search string contained a character which was outside the
single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the
case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be
returned.

** Functional changes

The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S,
which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file.

The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files.  For
over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that
this change will happen.  We now issue a warning indicating that the
change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make
this change in the 4.2.x series).

The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin,
-cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second timestamps, including
the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments.

The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second timestamps:
 atime   ctime  mtime
 %a      %c     %t
 %AS     %CS    %TS
 %AT     %CT    %TT
 %A+     %C+    %T+
 %AX     %CX    %TX


The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for
files.  One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted
X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose
name id the argument.  X and Y can be:

  a    Access time
  B    Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported)
  c    Change time
  m    Modification time
  t    Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison
       against a file status time, the argument is a time string.
       Not yet supported.

For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if
the file being considered was accessed more recently than the
reference file was modified.  The -newerXY test supports subsecond
timestamps where these are available.  The X=B variant is not yet
implemented.

If you configure the source code and then run the tests with "make
check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the
system binaries.


--
James Youngman <address@hidden>
GNU findutils maintainer