Announcing the release of GNU findutils 4.5.0

[James Youngman]

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 <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.  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 <address@hidden>
GNU findutils maintainer