Findutils 4.2.24 is now available on alpha.gnu.org

[James Youngman]

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 <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 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 <address@hidden>
GNU findutils maintainer