Findutils 4.2.27 is now available on ftp.gnu.org

[James Youngman]

I am pleased to announce the release of version 4.2.27 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 "stable" release of findutils.  It can be downloaded from
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/findutils.  The ftp.gnu.org site is very
busy, so you may find it more convenient to download findutils from
one of the mirror sites listed at http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html.

This release includes bugfixes and documentation improvements.  There
are no functional changes in this release.  All the changes since the
previous stable 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 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.  See also the "Downloading" section of
http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/.

I would like to thank Aaron Hawley, Benno Schulenberg, Primoz
Peterlin, Lenny Foner and the GNU Translation Project for their help
in preparing this release.  They have done a great deal of work to
improve the findutils documentation and to make findutils accessible
in languages other than English.  I would also like to thank Andreas
Metzler, Fr�d�ric Jolliton, Michael Diamond, Eric Blake and the
members of the bug-findutils mailing list for their help in diagnosing
and fixing problems and bugs.


* Major changes in release 4.2.27

** Warnings of Future Changes

The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
this change will probably be made in early 2006.  Meanwhile, a warning
message is given if you do this.

** Bug Fixes

If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
from the operating system.

Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.

On systems running the Linux kernel (for example GNU/Linux), "find
-printf %F" no longer produces the wrong answer for files on
filesystems that have been remounted elsewhere using "mount
--bind". (Savannah bug #14921).

** Documentation Changes

Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
now synchronised.

The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
it has existed since release 4.2.5.

The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
changed).


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