Findutils 4.3.1 is now available on alpha.gnu.org

[James Youngman]

I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.3.1 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/ (but the documentation there
does not include material about changes in the 4.3.x releases).

This is a "development" release of findutils.  It can be downloaded
from ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/findutils.

This release includes some significant changes, and so is not yet
ready for production use.  However, I encourage you to try it out.

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 like to thank Andreas Metzler, Rob Holland and Eric Blake for
their help in preparing this release.

The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases.  Please
test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
system.  New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
may change or go away.

All other changes in the 4.2.x release series up to and including
findutils-4.2.28 are included in this release.  In addition the
following changes are new in this release:


* Major changes in release 4.3.1

** Bug Fixes

Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
expressions start.  This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
expression. (Savannah bug #15235).

You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
which have missing expressions, such as
      find . ( )
      find . !
      find . -a
      find . \( -not \)
      find . \( -true -a

Savannah bug #15800 (also fixed in 4.2.28): If find finds more
subdirectories within a parent directory than it previously expected
to based on the link count of the parent, the resulting error message
now gives the correct directory name (previously an error message was
issued but it specified the wrong directory).

Savannah bug #16738 (also fixed in 4.2.28): "find .... -exec ... {} +"
now works if you have a large environment and many files must be
passed to the -exec action.  The same problem affected the -execdir
action, though since the number of files in a given directory will
normally be smaller, the problem was worse for -exec.

Savannah bug #16579 (also fixed in 4.2.28): Updatedb now works if it
is running as a user whose login shell is not actually a shell.

There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
Savannah bug #16269).

** Functional changes

For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
option.  This causes the printing of various sorts of information
about find's internal state and progress.

The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print").

** Performance Enhancements

Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser.  It has an idea of
the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
is more expensive).  It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
each test and its likely success.  Predicates with side effects (for
example -delete or -exec) are not reordered.  The optimiser is not
yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
optimisation level.  To see this in action, try
  find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
and compare the optimised query with:
  find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
and
  find -D opt     . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z

Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
will be moved to lower optimisation levels.  Some optimisations have
always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
if possible).

** Translations

Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
languages:
 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian

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