Findutils 4.2.4 is released on alpha.gnu.org

[James Youngman]

I'm happy to announce the availability of findutils version 4.2.4 at
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/findutils.  

The findutils 4.2.4 release is a functional enhancement, but I would
like to work towards getting a release uploaded to ftp.gnu.org.  This
could be any release, but if testing with findutils-4.2.4 goes well,
it could be this one.  Therefore please provide me with some feedback
on this release - it's been a while since a new findutils release was
uploaded to ftp.gnu.org and I'd like to get some of the bugfixes we've
implemented in 4.2.x onto ftp.gnu.org.

The NEWS file for this release says :-

* Major changes in release 4.2.4

**  Functionality Changes
*** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
    now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
    locate).
*** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
    doesn't support that much).
*** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
    is now issued.  Options should be specified immediately after the
    list of paths to search.  These warnings are enabled if you
    specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty.  They are disabled
    by the use of the -nowarn option.
*** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
    which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
*** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
    output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
    grep -c).  
*** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
    number of results.  This is useful if you only want to find out if
    there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
    to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
*** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
    be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
    database, rather than the whole name.  The default behaviour
    (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
    parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
*** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
    pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.

**  Bug Fixes
*** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
    systems that have non-writable string constants.
*** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
    values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
    error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
    value).

The -c and -l options to locate also exist in *BSD.  

The software currently builds successfully from CVS with Automake
versions 1.7, 1.8 and 1.9.  However, "make distcheck" currently fails
with Automake version 1.8 and above.  This is a problem with the "make
dist" target and isn't a bug in the installed software itself.

I'm still seeking feedback on the implementation of the --delete
action of find.

Regards,
James Youngman