These are the GNU core utilities. This package is the union of the GNU fileutils, sh-utils, and textutils packages. Most of these programs have significant advantages over their Unix counterparts, such as greater speed, additional options, and fewer arbitrary limits. The programs that can be built with this package are: basename cat chgrp chmod chown chroot cksum comm cp csplit cut date dd df dir dircolors dirname du echo env expand expr factor false fmt fold ginstall groups head hostid hostname id join kill link ln logname ls md5sum mkdir mkfifo mknod mv nice nl nohup od paste pathchk pinky pr printenv printf ptx pwd readlink rm rmdir seq sha1sum shred sleep sort split stat stty su sum sync tac tail tee test touch tr true tsort tty uname unexpand uniq unlink uptime users vdir wc who whoami yes See the file NEWS for a list of major changes in the current release. See the file INSTALL for compilation and installation instructions. These programs are intended to be POSIX.2 compliant (with BSD and other extensions), like the rest of the GNU system. The ls, dir, and vdir commands are all separate executables instead of one program that checks argv[0] because people often rename these programs to things like gls, gnuls, l, etc. Renaming a program file shouldn't affect how it operates, so that people can get the behavior they want with whatever name they want. Special thanks to Paul Eggert, Brian Matthews, Bruce Evans, Karl Berry, Kaveh Ghazi, and François Pinard for help with debugging and porting these programs. Many thanks to all of the people who have taken the time to submit problem reports and fixes. All contributed changes are attributed in the ChangeLog file. And thanks to the following people who have provided accounts for portability testing on many different types of systems: Bob Proulx, Christian Robert, François Pinard, Greg McGary, Harlan Stenn, Joel N. Weber, Mark D. Roth, Matt Schalit, Nelson H. F. Beebe, Réjean Payette, Sam Tardieu. Thanks to Michael Stone for inflicting test releases of the fileutils on Debian's unstable distribution, and to all the kind folks who used that distribution and found and reported bugs. Note that each man page is now automatically generated from a template and from the corresponding --help usage message. Patches to the template files (man/*.x) are welcome. However, the authoritative documentation is in texinfo form in the doc directory. If you run the tests on a SunOS4.1.4 system, expect the ctime-part of the ls `time-1' test to fail. I believe that is due to a bug in the way Sun implemented link(2) and chmod(2). *************************************** Last-minute notes, before coreutils-5.0 --------------------------------------- A known problem exists when compiling on HPUX on both hppa and ia64 in 64-bit mode (i.e. +DD64) on all known HPUX 11.x versions. This is not due to a bug in the package but instead due to a bug in the system header file which breaks things in 64-bit mode. The default compilation mode is 32-bit and the software compiles fine using the default mode. To build this software in 64-bit mode you will need to fix the system /usr/include/inttypes.h header file. After correcting that file the software also compiles fine in 64-bit mode. Here is one possible patch to correct the problem. --- /usr/include/inttypes.h.orig Thu May 30 01:00:00 1996 +++ /usr/include/inttypes.h Sun Mar 23 00:20:36 2003 @@ -489 +489 @@ -#ifndef __STDC_32_MODE__ +#ifndef __LP64__ On some systems, some of the tests fail when run as root. All failures I've seen appear to be due to problems in the testing framework, not in the tools themselves. I'll address that for the next release by using a program like setuidgid (see the comment in TODO). *************************************** There are pretty many tests, but nowhere near as many as we need. Additions and corrections are very welcome. If you see a problem that you've already reported, feel free to re-report it -- it won't bother me to get a reminder. Besides, the more messages I get regarding a particular problem the sooner it'll be fixed -- usually. If you sent a complete patch and, after a couple weeks you haven't received any acknowledgement please ping us. A complete patch includes a well-written ChangeLog entry, unified (diff -u format) diffs relative to the most recent test release, an explanation for why the patch is necessary or useful, and if at all possible, enough information to reproduce whatever problem prompted it. If your patch adds a new feature, please try to get some sort of consensus that it is a worthwhile change. One way to do that is to send mail to bug-coreutils@gnu.org including as much description and justification as you can. Based on the feedback that generates, you may be able to convince us that it's worth adding. WARNING: If you modify files like configure.in, m4/*.m4, aclocal.m4, or any Makefile.am, then don't be surprised if what gets regenerated no longer works. To make things work, you'll have to be using appropriate versions of automake and autoconf. As for what versions are `appropriate', use the versions of * autoconf specified via AC_PREREQ in m4/jm-macros.m4 * automake specified via AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE in configure.ac Usually it's fine to use versions that are newer than those specified. These programs all recognize the `--version' option. When reporting bugs, please include in the subject line both the package name/version and the name of the program for which you found a problem. For general documentation on the coding and usage standards this distribution follows, see the GNU Coding Standards, http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html. Mail suggestions and bug reports for these programs to the address on the last line of --help output.