GNU Core Utilities - News: coreutils-8.24 released [stable]

coreutils-8.24 released [stable]

Item posted by Pádraig Brady <pixelbeat> on Fri 03 Jul 2015 10:13:45 PM UTC.

This is to announce coreutils-8.24, a stable release.

There have been 250 commits by 36 people in the 50 weeks since 8.23
See the NEWS below for more details.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
The following people contributed changes to this release:

  Alban Bedel (1)                 Kristoffer Brånemyr (1)
  Anders Jonsson (1)              Michael Witten (1)
  Andreas Gruenbacher (1)         Michal Nazarewicz (1)
  Assaf Gordon (6)                Mike Frysinger (1)
  Bernhard Voelker (25)           Mitchel Humpherys (1)
  Boris Ranto (2)                 Nick Alcock (1)
  Christoph Anton Mitterer (1)    Paul Eggert (23)
  Daiki Ueno (1)                  Pádraig Brady (158)
  Dan Jacobson (1)                Rasmus Borup Hansen (1)
  David Sterba (1)                Reuben Thomas (1)
  Dylan Cali (1)                  Shane M Seymour (1)
  Eric Blake (1)                  Stephane Chazelas (1)
  Federico Simoncelli (1)         Stéphane Aulery (1)
  Fridolin Pokorny (1)            Tobias Stoeckmann (1)
  Giuseppe Scrivano (2)           Wieland Hoffmann (1)
  Jarosław Gruca (1)              Yunlian Jiang (1)
  Jim Meyering (6)                Yurij Goncharuk (1)
  KO Myung-Hun (3)                Yury Usishchev (1)

Pádraig [on behalf of the coreutils maintainers]

==================================================================

Here is the GNU coreutils home page:
    http://gnu.org/s/coreutils/

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v8.24
or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git shortlog v8.23..v8.24

To summarize the 320 gnulib-related changes, run these commands
from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git checkout v8.24
  git submodule summary v8.23

==================================================================

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.24.tar.xz
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.24.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/coreutils/coreutils-8.24.tar.xz
  http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/coreutils/coreutils-8.24.tar.xz.sig

[*] Use a .sig file 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-8.24.tar.xz.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 DF6FD971306037D9

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.69
  Automake 1.15
  Gnulib v0.1-504-gd03962a
  Bison 3.0.2

NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
  Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.

  df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]

  du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
  Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]

  chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
  This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
  depending on the implicit chdir("/").
  [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]

  cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
  source directory is specified multiple times.  Now, consistent with other
  file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
  or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.

  factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

  head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
  /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.

  mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
  even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
  [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]

  numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
  large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
  [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]

  numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
  settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
  [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]

  paste no longer truncates output for large input files.  This would happen
  for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
  character at the 4GiB position.
  [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]

  rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
  on all platforms.  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]

  shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
  a diagnostic.  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]

  tail releases inotify resources when unused.  Previously it could exhaust
  resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

  tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

  tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
  replaced before inotify watches were created.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

  tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
  [bug introduced in the beginning]

  tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
  when those files are being created or renamed.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

** New features

  chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
  to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
  king directory.  The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
  the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.

  dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
  on stderr approximately every second.

  numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
  to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.

  split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
  other than the default newline character.

  stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
  a useful setting with high latency links.

  sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
  --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.

  tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
  and output errors in general.

** Changes in behavior

  df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
  these are generally explicitly mounted.  The --total option does still
  suppress duplicate remote file systems.
  [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]

  mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
  The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
  instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted.  Also on case
  insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
  if called like `mv file File`.  The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.

  numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
  and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.

  tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.

  tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
  for better conformance to POSIX.  This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.

  timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
  which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.

** Improvements

  cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
  and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.

  cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
  non regular file.  For example when copying a disk image to a device node.

  mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
  more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.

  stat and tail now know about IBRIX.  stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
  system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.

  wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.

  References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
  in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
  documentation are provided.