GNU Core Utilities - News: coreutils-8.13 released [stable]

coreutils-8.13 released [stable]

Item posted by Jim Meyering <meyering> on Thu 08 Sep 2011 07:54:48 PM UTC.

This is to announce coreutils-8.13, a stable release.

There have been almost 200 commits by 18 people in coreutils proper and
just over 1000 commits in gnulib since coreutils-8.12.  That 200 is far
more than the per-release average (90-100) over recent years, but don't
worry: most of them have been to improve portability, robustness and
testing and to add new features, with relatively few to fix actual bugs.

See the NEWS below for a brief summary.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!

Jim [on behalf of the coreutils maintainers]
==================================================================

Here is the GNU Coreutils home page:
    http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v8.13
or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git shortlog v8.12..v8.13

To summarize the many gnulib-related changes, run these commands from
a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git checkout v8.13
  git submodule summary v8.12


Here are the compressed sources:
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.13.tar.gz   (12MB)
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.13.tar.xz   (4.7MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.13.tar.gz.sig
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.13.tar.xz.sig

To reduce load on the main server, use a mirror listed at:
  http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

[*] You can use either of the above signature files to verify that
the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact.  First,
be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball.
Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify coreutils-8.13.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 000BEEEE

and rerun the `gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.68.79-5e017
  Automake 1.11a
  Gnulib v0.0-6125-gda1717b
  Bison 2.4.609-f3bd

==================================================================
NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
  I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
  [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]

  cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
  directory.  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]

  cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
  of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree.  I.e., if s/a and s/b
  are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
  to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
  [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]

  fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
  proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
  Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
  Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
  [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
  introduced in coreutils-8.0.  The prior implementation of rm did not use
  as much memory.  du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
  chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support.  ]

  pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
  [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]

  printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
  [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]

  split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]

  timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
  timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
  [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]

  unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
  followed by a tab.  In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
  We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

** Changes in behavior

  chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
  when -v or -c specified.

  cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
  files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.

** New features

  date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
  separator.  It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
  with a space between the date and time strings.  Now it also parses
  "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
  variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"

  md5sum accepts the new --strict option.  With --check, it makes the
  tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
  This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.

  split accepts a new --filter=CMD option.  With it, split filters output
  through CMD.  CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
  the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD.  For example, to
  split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
    split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
  Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
  That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.

  timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
  directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
  receive signals initiated from the terminal.

** Improvements

  cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10.  Before, it would
  mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.

  cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
  in gnulib.

  df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
  or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.

  join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
  unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".

  shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
  For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.

  stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.

  timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.

** Build-related

  Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
  when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.

  Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.