NEWS.md

luaposix NEWS - User visible changes

Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]

Bugs Fixed

• posix.sys.socket.recvfrom no longer casts a ssize_t result into an int.

• Using conditional compilation for functions that have been implemented when compiling with luajit.

Noteworthy changes in release 36.2.1 (2023-06-16) [stable]

Incompatible Changes

• Using latest typecheck and specl rocks requires that our argument errors list all typenames in full ("integer" not "int") and unions in order ("nil or string" not "string or nil".

  All luaposix APIs now report argument type errors accordingly.

Bugs Fixed

• posix.unistd.read and posix.sys.socket.recv no longer hide the underlying real error by casting a ssize_t result into an unsigned size_t local.

• Fix a typo in the lflag argument name in the termios table LDocs.

• posix.sys.* submodules are correctly preloaded into the module table returned by require 'posix' so that this undocumented, deprecated and slow way to access the functions therein continues to work for now:

  local posix = require 'posix'
  local stat  = posix.sys.stat.stat
  

  For new code, consider this fast and documented alternative, that does not load every available luaposix API from disk (especially if your project does not use APIs from every luaposix module):

  local stat  = require 'posix.sys.stat'.stat
  

• Removed IUTF8 from the documented list of supported iflag values in posix.termios because it was previously unimplemented. Implemented non-portable support as an XSI extension, as it isn't a part of the POSIX standard.

Noteworthy changes in release 36.1 (2023-01-31) [stable]

Bugs Fixed

• luke now uses the same cpp defines for conftests as will be used for module compilation, otherwise we are potentially testing and compiling with different sets of features.

• tm.tm_gmtoff and tm.tm_zone are populated on Linux distros that require compiling with -D_BSD_SOURCE.

Noteworthy changes in release 36.0 (2023-01-29) [stable]

Incompatible Changes

• posix.spawn always returns integer, string whether fork fails immediately, or whatever waiting for the spawned process reports. When the second result value is "exited", the first is the exit status; for "killed" or "stopped" second value, the first is the signal number that caused it; otherwise first the errno error number, followed by the associated error string.

  The documentation for posix.spawn has always been wrong up until now, but this small change to simplify the returned results will require checking whether the second result value is "exited", "killed", "stopped" or any other string before interpreting the first result... which was also necessary in prior versions too, but now the interpretion of non-zero status by clients is less messy and somewhat compatible with the happy path of using previous releases.

• Argument type errors for posix.sys.msg.msgctl, posix.sys.resource.setrlimit, posix.sys.socket.bind, posix.sys.socket.connect, posix.sys.socket.getaddrinfo, posix.sys.socket.sendto and posix.time.nanosleep all use "integer" in full rather than "int".

Bugs Fixed

• luke no longer crashes in std.normalize require loops occasionally in Lua 5.4.

• Don't leak err into global scope from compat.open

• Correct LDoc comments for sys.resource.setrlimit.

• Where an integer argument is expected, for consistency with Lua 5.2 and older, always allow 0.0 to be accepted as if 0 had been passed. For example: pwd.getpwuid(0.0).

• require 'posix'.glob '.*' continues to invoke the backwards compatibility glob function, but that no longer prevents access to the preloaded require 'posix'.glob.glob binding.

• The fcntl binding is still available from the top-level posix module as require 'posix'.fcntl, but that no longer prevents access to the preloaded require 'posix'.fcntl.fcntl binding.

• poll.poll and poll.rpoll LDocs correctly describe the returned integer as being 0 for timeout or the number of ready file descriptors.

• stdio.fdopen returned streams can be closed from Lua 5.1 without a NULL pointer dereference crash.

• Both sys.resource.getrlimit and sys.resource.setrlimit properly roundtrip rlim_t values.

• sys.socket.getpeername and sys.socket.getsockname now return a correctly filled sockaddr table. In case of an AF_UNIX socket, the returned path is now cropped to the correct length.

• time constants are nil valued, even on hosts which fail to define them when _POSIX_TIMERS is set as if they should be.

• time.gmtime and time.localtime no longer wrap around with arguments of 2^31 and larger.

• time.gmtime and time.localtime propagate any tm_gmoffset and tm_zone fields supported by the host's struct tm.

• time.strftime reliably fills %z and %Z specifiers. Note that if your host POSIX library provides a strftime that assumes the local timezone, %z will always print the local UTC offset, regardless of the tm_gmoffset field value passed in.

  Consider (subject to host strftime implementation!):

  local t = require 'posix.time'
  local now = t.time()
  local zulu_t = t.strftime("%c UTC+0000", t.gmtime(now)))
  local localt = t.strftime("%c %Z UTC%z", t.localtime(now)))
  

• unistd.getcwd no longer leaks memory if GNU was defined at compile time.

• unistd.readlink works reliably inside a /proc filesystem.

• unistd.write takes an optional third argument nbytes to conform better to the SUSv3 specification. For backwards compatibility, the entirety of buf is written when a third argument is not passed (or is nil).

• Many bindings use now a lua_Integer (with at least 53 bits for magnitude, depending on the host Lua version) instead of a C int type to pass numeric arguments, so much larger values can be successfully passed to and from the following bindings: fcntl.open, posix.fcntl.posix_fadvise, fnmatch.fnmatch, posix.grp.getgrgid, pwd.getpwuid, sched.sched_getscheduler, sched.sched_setscheduler, signal.kill, signal.killpg, signal.raise, sys.msg.msgget, sys.msg.msgrcv, sys.socket.recv, sys.socket.recvfrom, sys.socket.setsockopt, sys.stat.S_ISBLK, sys.stat.S_ISCHR, sys.stat.S_ISDIR, sys.stat.S_ISFIFO, sys.stat.S_ISLNK, sys.stat.S_ISREG, sys.stat.S_ISSOCK, sys.stat.chmod, sys.stat.mkdir, sys.stat.mkfifo, sys.stat.umask, sys.wait.wait, syslog.LOG_MASK, time.mktime, unistd._exit, unistd.alarm, unistd.ftruncate, unistd.getegid, unistd.geteguid, unistd.getgid, unistd.getopt, unistd.getpgrp, unistd.getpid, unistd.getppid, unistd.getuid, unistd.gethostid, unistd.lseek, unistd.pathconf, unistd.read, unistd.setpid, unistd.sleep, unistd.sysconf, unistd.truncate, utime.utime.

• Most of the spec examples run correctly on FreeBSD now!

New Features

• unistd.write takes an optional fourth argument offset to allow efficent writing of a substring of buf. For backwards compatibility, the entirety of buf is written when the third and fourth arguments are not passed (or are nil).

• When running in luajit, use luajit's internal bit functions instead of depending on the bit32 module being available.

Noteworthy changes in release 35.1 (2021-09-09) [stable]

Bugs Fixed

• Documentation cleanups: full and correct return docs including an errnum where necessary; make sure we have a link to SUSv3 wherever available; add an ', if successful' suffix to a normap return result followed by error return results; fixed several typos.

• Update fork2.lua example to match current APIs

New Features

• Support AF_PACKET socket family, where available.

• Support SIGINFO, SIGWINCH and SA_RESTART, where available.

Noteworthy changes in release 35.0 (2020-07-06) [stable]

Incompatible Changes

• Internally, we use our own bitwise operation wrapper functions rather than bit32 where possible. This means bitwise operations when running under Lua 5.3+ work on 64bit integers.

Bugs Fixed

• posix.deprecated.getrlimit and posix.deprecated.setrlimit pass tests again.

New Features

• Initial support for Lua 5.4.

Noteworthy changes in release 34.1.1 (2019-07-27) [stable]

Bugs Fixed

• posix.compat really does work without std.normalize in the package.path now.

Noteworthy changes in release 34.1 (2019-07-20) [stable]

Bugs Fixed

• luke works with upgraded bootstrap luarocks version of require.

• posix.glob.glob does not return a random errno on failure now, but new module constants GLOB_ABORTED, GLOB_NOMATCH or GLOB_NOSPACE.

• posix.deprecated.clock_getres and posix.deprecated.clock_gettime work again.

New Features

• posix.glob.glob supports now module constants as a second argument: GLOB_NOCHECK and GLOB_ERR.

• posix.sys.socket now supports IPV6 link-local addresses.

• use std.strict, std._debug and typecheck modules when available, otherwise behave normally without those additional runtime checks.

Noteworthy changes in release 34.0.4 (2018-02-20) [stable]

Bugs Fixed

• posix.time.clock_getres, posix.time.clock_gettime posix.time.CLOCK_MONOTONIC, posix.time.CLOCK_REALTIME, posix.time.CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID and posix.time.CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID are all properly elided on macOS again.

• spec/spec_helper.lua now looks in the correct objdir for object modules built by luke, instead of hard-coding ./linux/?.so, so specl examples work on macOS and others again.

Noteworthy changes in release 34.0.3 (2018-02-19) [stable]

Bugs Fixed

• posix.deprecated.fadvise is properly elided on macOS and other hosts that have no posix.fcntl.posix_fadvise implementation.

Noteworthy changes in release 34.0.2 (2018-02-17) [stable]

Incompatible Changes

• require 'posix' (or any of its submodules) always returns a populated module table, but no longer sets _G.posix or any other global symbol on Lua 5.1 (including LuaJIT). If you were relying on this behaviour, please change your require statments to an assignment:

  local posix = require 'posix'

Bugs Fixed

• posix.sys.wait.wait returns <childpid>, "running" when the child has not exited yet, and wait was called with WNOHANG set.

• specs don't fail on valid -1 return values from posix.sysconf.

• loading posix (or any of its submodules) no longer leaks symbols into the global namespace on Lua 5.1 (including LuaJIT).

Noteworthy changes in release 34.0.1 (2017-07-09) [stable]

Bugs Fixed

• posix.sys.socket works correctly on macOS again.

• posix.sys.socket abstract namespaces work correctly on Linux.

• posix.syslog.openlog keeps a copy of it's ident parameter string in the Lua registry to ensure we don't hang on to a dangling pointer.

• latest build-aux/luke and upgraded lukefile work correctly on macOS now.

Noteworthy changes in release 34.0 (2017-05-06) [stable]

Incompatible Changes

• posix.syslog constants LOG_AUTHPRIV, LOG_FTP and LOG_SYSLOG are no longer documented, and only defined when supported by the host C library. They are not part of the POSIX API, and prevented compilation of luaposix on AIX and Solaris.

• getopt.getopt was a binding to the GNU getopt_long extension, which is not a POSIX API, and prevents luaposix from compiling on hosts that do not provide the extended API. Instead we now correctly bind POSIX getopt(3) in posix.unistd.

  If you still have code that uses the old non-POSIX binding, then LuaRocks has the Lua only alt-getopt module which is very similar, and works even when the host C library has no getopt_long API; alternatively, you should consider migrating to the far more powerful Lua-only optparse library, also available from LuaRocks.

New Features

• Replaced all Autotools and supporting Slingshot code with new Lua- based build-aux/luke and lukefile describing how to compile and install everything. Building with LuaRocks now leverages this too.

• New posix.sys.socket.getsockopt and posix.sys.socket.getpeername bindings.

• New posix.sys.msg.msgctl binding, and posix.sys.msg.IPC_RMID, posix.sys.msg.IPC_SET and posix.sys.msg.IPC_STAT constants to use with it.

• New posix.unistd.ftruncate and posix.unistd.truncate bindings.

• posix.fcntl.fcntl now accepts undocumented posix.fcntl.O_TMPFILE value where supported by the host C library.

Bugs Fixed

• posix.unistd.ttyname now returns an error message in addition to nil when it fails.

Noteworthy changes in release 33.4.0 (2016-02-27) [stable]

Incompatible Changes

• posix.curses has been split back out into its own separate project again. If you want to upgrade your posix.curses using project, something like the following minimal change will work equivalently (assuming you have the new lcurses on your package path):

  local posix = require 'posix'
  posix.curses = posix.curses or require 'lcurses'

New Features

• New posix.stdio.rename binding.

• New posix.fcntl.FD_CLOEXEC flag for posix.fcntl.fcntl.

• New posix.fcntl.O_CLOEXEC flag for posix.fcntl.open, where supported by the underlying system. Falling back to FD_CLOEXEC is an exercise to the caller, so that non-atomicity is surfaced:

  -- without error checking, for clarity
  fd = fcntl.open ("/foo/bar", fcntl.O_CLOEXEC, stat.S_IRWXU)
  if fcntl.O_CLOEXEC == 0 then
    local flags = fcntl.fcntl (fd, fcntl.F_GETFD)
    fcntl.fcntl (fd, fcntl.F_SETFD, bit.bor (flags, fcntl.FD_CLOEXEC)
  end

• New posix.unistd.tcgetpgrp and posix.unistd.tcsetpgrp bindings where supported by host C library.

• posix.sys.socket AF_UNIX path handling improvements enable use of Linux only abstract namespace sockets.

• Documentation links now point at the newer OpenGroup issue 7 specs.

Bugs Fixed

• Workaround for https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15088. Predicate use of POSIX sched.h APIs on presence of sched.h, since glibc defines _POSIX_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING erroneously, and musl libc provides the sched.h APIs but doesn't define _POSIX_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING.

• posix.sys.socket AF_UNIX APIs pass path arguments by length instead of terminating at the first \0 byte.

• posix.unistd.readlink no longer fails when reading a link to an unsized buffer or character special device node.

• execx is no longer leaked into the global namespace after loading the posix module.

• examples/fork2.lua works correctly again.

• posix.timeradd, posix.timercmp and posix.timersub correctly handle tables from the modern thin wrapper API (posix.sys.time), while retaining compatibility with the legacy compatibility wrappers (posix.gettimeofday).

Noteworthy changes in release 33.3.1 (2015-03-01) [stable]

Incompatible Changes

• The briefly lived posix.system API has been removed. It was renamed to posix.spawn shortly after introduction, and can still be accessed by the new symbol name.

Bugs Fixed

• local posix = require "posix" works again, fixing the regression introduced in the last release. The automated Travis checks have been improved to catch this sort of bug in future.

Noteworthy changes in release 33.3.0 (2015-02-28) [stable]

New Features

• Improved documentation of sockaddr tables for posix.sys.socket calls.

• New posix.sys.socket.getsockname binding.

• Remove the posix.bit32 library, and use Lua’s built-in bit32 library.

• Can now be linked against NetBSD curses, albeit with several functions not implemented by that library returning a "not implemented" error as a consequence.

• New functions popen, popen_pipeline and pclose mimic the POSIX functions of the same name while allowing tasks to be Lua functions.

• fdopen has been re-added, working on all supported Lua versions.

• execx allows a Lua function or command to be exec’d; spawn is now implemented in terms of it.

Incompatible Changes

• The ncurses-only KEY_MOUSE definition has been removed from posix.curses.

Bugs Fixed

• posix.sys.resource only provides RLIM_SAVED_CUR and RLIM_SAVED_MAX if they are defined by the C library (which FreeBSD 10 does not).

• posix.dirent.dir and posix.dirent.files now raise a Lua error() when unable to open the path argument, for orthogonality with io.lines.

• Workaround for manifest key clash between posix.so and posix.lua in LuaRocks.

Noteworthy changes in release 33.2.1 (2015-01-04) [stable]

Bugs Fixed

• Install posix.curses.html documentation file correctly.

Noteworthy changes in release 33.2.0 (2015-01-03) [stable]

New Features

• QNX support.

Bugs Fixed

• posix.time.gmtime and posix.time.localtime specifications now work correctly in January too!

Noteworthy changes in release 33.1.0 (2014-12-19) [stable]

New Features

• New posix.bit32 module with band, bnot and bor functions that can be used from any supported Lua release, without worrying about loading an external bit operations library.

• Preliminary Lua 5.3.0 compatibility.

Bugs Fixed

• No more 'Bad Hints' errors from posix.sys.socket.getaddrinfo on many hosts.

• stdlib.setenv accepts a 3rd argument again.

Noteworthy changes in release 33.0.0 (2014-11-04) [stable]

New Features

• The curses library is fully integrated into luaposix, including reasonably comprehensive LDoc documentation (certainly much better than the single wooly web-page in previous releases). For backwards compatibility, all APIs are re-exported from the curses module.

• Most constants available through luaposix are now listed in the LDocs of the submodule that defines them.

• For backwards compatibility, everything is still lumped together in the posix.??? namespace, but, now raw APIs have been reorganised according to the POSIX header files they belong to:

  local posix  = require "posix"
  local fcntl  = require "posix.fcntl"
  local unistd = require "posix.unistd"
  
  local fd = fcntl.open ("x",
     bit32.bor (posix.O_WRONLY, posix.O_CREAT), "u=rw")
  unistd.write (fd, "Hello, World!\n")
  unistd.close (fd)

  This makes the documentation easier to navigate, and for a better mapping between luaposix APIs and the C functions they wrap, so translating from C is now easier than ever.

• Each of the newly separated submodules is self-contained, and can be copied to another project for compiling and/or loading in a custom Lua runtime. If you want to make use of this, in addition to the source for the modules you copy, you'll also need at least the files ext/posix/_helpers.c and ext/include/lua52compat.c, and also ext/include/strlcat.c for one or two of them.

• Where submodule calls return a table representation of a similar C struct from a POSIX API, the Lua return tables have an appropriate _type field metatable entry compatible with lua-stdlib std.object.type.

• posix.signal.signal now accepts the constants posix.signal.SIG_DFL or posix.signal.SIG_IGN in place of the strings "SIG_DFL" and "SIG_IGN".

• The submodule bindings posix.time.gmtime, posix.time.localtime, posix.time.mktime, posix.time.strftime and posix.time.strptime now accept or create PosixTm tables with 1-to-1 field name mappings with the POSIX struct tm. The old APIs with custom field names is still available as posix.gmtime, posix.localtime, posix.mktime, posix.strftime and posix.strptime.

• Similarly, posix.time.nanosleep now takes and returns a PosixTimespec table. The old API is still available as posix.nanosleep.

• Where supported by the underlying system, posix.time.clock_getres and posix.time.clock_gettime now require a constant inte argument (newly defined in the posix.time submodule), and returns a PosixTimespec table. The old APIs are still available as posix.clock_getres and posix.clock_gettime.

• Add posix.unistd.gethostid. The old posix.hostid API is still available as an alias.

• Add group APIs from grp.h: posix.grp.endgrent, posix.grp.getgrent, posix.grp.getgrgid, posix.grp.getgrnam and posix.grp.setgrent. Consequently, posix.getgroup is now reimplemented in Lua over the POSIX APIs.

• posix.getgroup defaults to current effective group when called with no arguments, for consistency with posix.getpasswd API.

• Add pwd APIs from pwd.h: posix.pwd.endpwent, posix.grp.getpwent, posix.pwd.getpwnam, posix.pwd.getpwuid and posix.pwd.setpwent. Consequently, posix.getpasswd is now reimplemented in Lua over the POSIX APIs.

• Add missing constants from sys/resource.h: posix.sys.resource.RLIM_INFINITY, posix.sys.resource.RLIM_SAVED_CUR, posix.sys.resource.RLIM_SAVED_MAX, posix.sys.resource.RLIMIT_CORE, posix.sys.resource.RLIMIT_CPU, posix.sys.resource.RLIMIT_DATA, posix.sys.resource.RLIMIT_FSIZE, posix.sys.resource.RLIMIT_NOFILE, posix.sys.resource.RLIMIT_STACK, posix.sys.resource.RLIMIT_AS.

• Add missing APIs from unistd.h: posix.unistd.getegid, posix.unistd.geteuid, posix.unistd.getgid, posix.unistd.getuid, posix.unistd.getpgrp, posix.unistd.getpid, posix.unistd.getppid. Consequently, posix.getpid is now reimplemented in Lua over the POSIX APIs.

• Add missing constants from signal.h; posix.signal.SIG_DFL and `posix.signal.SIG_IGN'.

• Add missing APIs from sys/stat.h: posix.sys.stat.S_ISBLK, posix.sys.stat.S_ISCHR, posix.sys.stat.S_ISDIR, posix.sys.stat.S_ISFIFO, posix.sys.stat.S_ISLNK, posix.sys.stat.S_ISREG, posix.sys.stat.S_ISSOCK.

• Add missing constants from sys/stat.h: posix.sys.stat.S_IFMT, posix.sys.stat.S_IFBLK, posix.sys.stat.S_IFCHR, posix.sys.stat.S_IFDIR, posix.sys.stat.S_IFIFO, posix.sys.stat.S_IFLNK, posix.sys.stat.S_IFREG, posix.sys.stat.S_IRWXU, posix.sys.stat.S_IRUSR, posix.sys.stat.S_IWUSR, posix.sys.stat.S_IXUSR, posix.sys.stat.S_IRWXG, posix.sys.stat.S_IRGRP, posix.sys.stat.S_IWGRP, posix.sys.stat.S_IXGRP, posix.sys.stat.S_IRWXO, posix.sys.stat.S_IROTH, posix.sys.stat.S_IWOTH, posix.sys.stat.S_IXOTH, posix.sys.stat.S_ISGID, posix.sys.stat.S_ISUID.

• Add missing constants from syslog.h: posix.syslog.LOG_CONS, posix.syslog.LOG_NDELAY and posix.syslog.LOG_PID.

• Add missing API from syslog.h: posix.syslog.LOG_MASK. Use this to convert syslog priority constants into mask bits suitable for bitwise ORing as the argument to posix.syslog.setlogmask.

• Add missing constants from time.h: posix.time.CLOCK_MONOTONIC, posix.time.CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID, posix.time.CLOCK_REALTIME and posix.time.CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID.

• New posix.unistd.exec and posix.unistd.execp require a table of arguments, with [0] defaulting to the command name. The old string tuple passing API is still available as posix.exec and posix.execp.

• posix.util.openpty has moved to posix.openpty. The old API is still available as an alias.

• All posix APIs now fully and correctly diagnose extraneous and wrong type arguments with an error.

• Add posix.IPC_NOWAIT, posix.MSG_EXCEPT and posix.MSG_NOERROR constants for message queues.

• Add posix.IPPROTO_UDP for socket programming.

• Add posix.AI_NUMERICSERV for posix.getaddrinfo hints flags.

• Add posix.WUNTRACED for posix.wait flags.

• Add curses.A_COLOR (where supported by the underlying curses library) for extracting color pair assignments from the results of curses.window.winch.

• Add missing curses.KEY_F31 constant.

Bugs Fixed

• posix.fadvise is now spelled posix.fcntl.posix_fadvise and takes a file descriptor first argument rather than a Lua file handle. The old misspelled bad argument type version is undocumented but still works.

• posix.getpasswd, posix.getpid, posix.pathconf, posix.stat, posix.statvfs, posix.sysconf and posix.times process a single table argument with a list of types correctly.

• posix.syslog.openlog now takes the bitwise OR of those constants. The old string option specified API is still available as posix.openlog.

• posix.syslog.setlogmask now takes the bitwise OR of bits returned by passing priority constants to posix.syslog.LOG_MASK. The old API will continue to be available as posix.setlogmask.

• posix.readlink is much more robust, and reports errors accurately.

• configured installation installs posix.so into the lua cpath directory correctly.

• fixed a long-standing bug where the stdio buffers were not restored after some posix.fcntl() examples, resulting in the make check output being truncated -- often before terminal colors were returned to normal.

Noteworthy changes in release 32 (2014-05-30) [stable]

New Features

• Support for posix.socketpair call and posix.AF_UNIX constant.

• Previously undocumented spawn, pipeline, pipeline_iterator, pipeline_slurp, euidaccess, timeradd, timercmp and timersub have been moved from the posix table, which is reserved for strictly POSIX APIs to the posix.sys subtable. The sys submodule automatically loads on first reference, so no need to require it manually if you already have the main posix module loaded.

• posix api documentation is separated into groups for better discovery.

Bugs Fixed

• Builds correctly on hosts with no IPV6 capability.

• Small improvements in organisation of generated html docs.

• posix.openpty doesn't crash.

• configure now detects Lua correctly with busybox grep.

• Many fine portability fixes from latest gnulib.

• Missing docs for accept, bind, connect, getaddrinfo, listen, recv, recvfrom, send, sendto, setsockopt, shutdown, socket and socketpair apis is now provided.

• Missng docs for tcdrain, tcflow, tcflush, tcgetattr, tcsendbreak and tcsetattr terminal apis are now provided.

• Docs for apis implemented in Lua are now shown correctly.

Noteworthy changes in release 31 (2013-09-09) [stable]

New Features

• Missing termios cc flags are now available.

Bugs Fixed

• posix.tcgetattr and posix.tcsetattr no save and restore all flags, regardless of whether they are local extensions to POSIX.

Noteworthy changes in release 30 (2013-08-29) [stable]

New Features

• Support for file locks with fcntl() using F_SETLK, F_SETLKW, F_GETLK, F_RDLCK, F_WRLCK and F_UNLCK.

• Preliminary support for GNU Hurd, and OpenBSD.

Bugs Fixed

• posix.shutdown can actually be called now.

• Report the correct argument number in posix function error messages.

• Much reduced compiler warning noise.

• Many small typos and inconsistencies, see ChangeLog for details.

Noteworthy changes in release 29 (2013-06-28) [stable]

• This release adds wresize to curses, and sync, fsync, fdatasync, nice, lseek as well as socket programming functions. Several small improvements to the documentation were also added.

• luaposix is compatible with Lua 5.1, Lua 5.2 and luajit 2.0, so the 5.1 prefix to the release version has become an anachronism and has been dropped from this release onwards.

New Features

• Move to the Slingshot release system, which (among many other improvements) fixes release tarballs from github to work with the standard GNU-style: ./configure, make, make install. bootstrap is still distributed for those who need to re-bootstrap with a different version of gnulib and/or slingshot.

• Much improved former lunit and ad-hoc test scripts to Specl.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.28 (2013-03-23) [stable]

• This release fixes the previously unannounced posix.pipeline_iterator and posix.pipeline_slurp functions, and adds a test for them. A workaround for having LUA_INIT_5_2 set has been added to the build system.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.27 (2013-03-17) [stable]

• This release fixes broken Lua 5.1 compatibility in release 5.1.26 (sorry! And thanks to Nick McVeity for the bug report and patch); renames posix.system to posix.spawn (the old name is available for backwards compatibility), generalizing it to take a shell command, file and arguments, or Lua function; and adds posix.pipeline, which makes it easy to run a pipeline of processes, each a shell command, program, or Lua function.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.26 (2013-03-04) [stable]

• This release adds killpg, realpath and openpty, adds a flags parameter to signal, and improves some documentation.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.25 (2013-02-20) [stable]

• This release adds support for message queues and UNIX 98 pseudoterminals (thanks very much to the respective contributors), and allows argv[0] to be set in exec calls.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.24 (2013-02-15) [stable]

• This release adds isatty and constants STDIN_FILENO, STDOUT_FILENO and STDERR_FILENO, fixes a bug in readlink, adds a day field to time tables for compatibility with os.date, and overhauls the build and release system.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.23 (2012-10-04) [stable]

• This release fixes the curses module for Lua 5.2; previously it would not load with an unknown symbol error. The build process for luarocks has been made more robust.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.22 (2012-09-13) [stable]

• This release fixes building on Mac OS X and some other OSes which don't like building empty libraries. Thanks to Robert McLay for the bug report.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.21 (2012-09-10) [stable]

• This release adds comprehensive documentation for the posix module, from Steve Donovan and Natanael Copa.

• It makes one small change: rpoll now uses file descriptors, not Lua file objects (hence, via fileno, it can use both).

• Perhaps most importantly, it marks a change of maintainer, from Reuben Thomas to Alexander Nikolaev. Thanks very much to Alexander for agreeing to take over. Luaposix has garnered considerable interest in recent months, and more contributors have stepped forwards with patches. Alexander will help to oversee a maturing API, coordinate ongoing improvements and additions, and help ensure that luaposix doesn't fall back into disrepair as it has several times in the past.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.20 (2012-06-22) [stable]

New Features

• Improves signal handling.
• Improves the posix.system and creat functions (all thanks to Steve Donovan).
• Adds mkdtemp (thanks, 7hemroc).
• Adds statvfs (thanks to Like Ma).
• improves the tests.
• Adds some code guidelines.

Bugs Fixed

• Fixes a bug in getgroup.
• Fixes some space leaks (thanks, Alexander Nikolaev),
• Copes with sysconf for _PC_PATH_MAX returning -1.

Incompatible Changes

• The API of posix.open has changed to be more like the C version: the file creation and status flags are now constants in the POSIX namespace. This enables them to be used outside calls to open, and makes posix.open less magic. posix.open will now raise an error if no creation flags are given when O_CREAT is used.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.19 (2012-04-10) [stable]

• This release avoids the use of PATH_MAX, and copes with arbitrarily-long paths. The implementation of strlcpy is changed to a BSD-licensed implementation; the previously-used implementation was LGPL-licensed, which is not MIT-compatible; thanks to Alexander Gladysh for bringing this problem to my attention. (This was just mis-released as 5.1.18; sorry!)

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.18 (2012-03-26) [stable]

• This release implements full Lua 5.2 compatibility; thanks to Enrico Tassi for poking me to get this done.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.17 (2012-02-29) [stable]

• This release improves support for Lua 5.2; the curses module should now work fine (the posix module still needs updating). Signal handling has been improved to make it possible to chain to a C signal handler, and a bug in resetting the process's signal mask after running a Lua handler has been fixed.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.16 (2012-02-18) [stable]

• This release includes rewritten fcntl and signals support, and bug fixes for read, chmod, getgroups and waitpid. curses boolean return values are now Lua booleans rather than 0 for OK or ERR for not OK. fnmatch, strptime and mktime are now supported, chmod now supports octal modes, thereâs much expanded poll support, and some non-POSIX and obsolete features have been removed. There are more tests and the build system has been improved. Thanks go to the many contributors to this release.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.15 (2011-09-29) [stable]

• This release adds dup, pipe, pipe2 and more fcntl support (thanks to Alexander V. Nikolaev and Alexander Gladysh for the patches). Two bugs in the test code which used incorrect paths and caused only one set of tests to run have been fixed.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.14 (2011-09-19) [stable]

• This release allows some constants to be case-insensitive in Lua, and fixes a small build-system bug.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.13 (2011-09-17) [stable]

This release adds a rockspec.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.12 (2011-09-09) [stable]

• This release adds some basic functions such as open, close, read and write, and integrates the pure Lua module which was previously in Lua stdlib. It also adds a whole new module, curses, which was previously in the separate lcurses project (curses is part of the POSIX standard).

Incompatible Changes

• Note that the C part of the POSIX module is now called posix_c.so (or similar), so if you have an old posix.so (or similar) you should delete it to avoid clashing with the new posix.lua.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.11 (2011-04-27) [stable]

• Apologies, 5.1.10, released earlier today, had a buffer overflow bug in the new mkstemp function. 5.1.11, just out, fixes it.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.10 (2011-04-27) [stable]

This release adds mkstemp, adds some fixes for building on Mac OS X

(thanks to Gary Vaughan), removes some non-POSIX rlimit constants,
guards some functions that were not correctly guarded, so that they
will not be compiled on systems that don't support them, and makes
other minor fixes.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.9 (2011-03-24) [stable]

New Features

• support for signals and for getopt. See below for details.

• Equally, there is still only the barest documentation: to use the various APIs you have to grep to see if the one you want is there and then read the C comment which gives the Lua API. If anyone is interested in adding better documentation, I'd be delighted to hear from them. (My work on luaposix is purely aimed at getting the support I need for GNU Zile, but as usual I welcome patches from others. luaposix is still far from complete, so please send patches for your favourite POSIX APIs!)

• luaposix 5.1.9 improves compatibility with Darwin/Mac OS X, and adds various new API bindings, for signals, getgroups, setting errno and _exit, as well as some slight code cleanup.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.8 (2013-03-23) [stable]

Bugs Fixed

• fix bugs for setrlimit and gettimeofday.
• an improvement to test.lua.
• better use of POSIX feature macros to determine what APIs to support.
• removal of the obsolete timezone argument to gettimeofday,
• remove the non-POSIX gecos field of struct passwd
• improvements to the build system
• some code tidy-up,
• removal of Lua 5.0 compatibility

New APIs

• abort, raise, isprint, isgraph, errno and stdio.h constants, and getopt_long.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.7 (2013-03-23) [stable]

A new minor bugfix release of luaposix is out.

Bugs Fixed

• make clock_* functions' argument optional
• fixes posix.version string

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.6 (2010-08-11) [stable]

• This release adds time functions: gettimeofday, clock_getres, clock_gettime, localtime, gmtime, time, strftime.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.5 (20??-??-??) [stable]

The release notes for this release were lost in the mists of thyme.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.4 (2008-07-18) [stable]

• Includes a fix for rpoll() from debian[1] and a patch from openwrt[2] that adds crypt().

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.3 (2013-03-23) [stable]

No changes.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.2 (2008-01-29) [stable]

Incompatible changes

• Please note that this release breakes the API for dup() and exec()

New Features

• dup() now takes and returns lua files rather than file descriptors (int).

• exec() uses now execv(3) rather than execvp(3). This means that the PATH environment variable is no longer used which means that all scripts currently using exec() without an absolute path will break. If you need the PATH variable, use the new execp() function.

• Added openlog(), syslog() and closelog() functions.

• The openlog(ident, [option], [facility]) function differs from the recently released luasyslog by giving the user possibility to set "option". The "option" parameter is a string containing one or more of the chars:

  'c' - LOG_CONS
  'n' - LOG_NDELAY
  'e' - LOG_PERROR
  'p' - LOG_PID
  

  It is possible to disable those funcs compile time by setting the ENABLE_SYSLOG define to 0.

• fileno() function was added.

Noteworthy changes in release 5.1.1 (2008-01-25) [stable]

• I have forked lposix. First release includes some patches submitted on this list.

  This first release is basicly lposix with a cleaned up Makefile + the patches found here:

  http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2006-10/msg00448.html http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2007-11/msg00346.html

• When the promised extened OS library[1] arrives I will most likely remove the overlapping functions in luaposix. posix specific functions that does not overlap will still be maintained and added. (e.g dup())

• Releases numbered 5.1.x[.y] will work with lua-5.1 series. The 'x' will add/change features and .y releases will be strict bugfixes (no new features).

• I had planned to add syslog functions and fix dup() to handle lua files (FILE*) rather than file descriptors (int). Now that luasyslog just released I will have to re-evaluate that.