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: [ arch base64 basename cat chcon chgrp chmod chown chroot cksum comm cp csplit cut date dd df dir dircolors dirname du echo env expand expr factor false fmt fold groups head hostid hostname id install join kill link ln logname ls md5sum mkdir mkfifo mknod mktemp mv nice nl nohup od paste pathchk pinky pr printenv printf ptx pwd readlink rm rmdir runcon seq sha1sum sha224sum sha256sum sha384sum sha512sum shred shuf sleep sort split stat stty su sum sync tac tail tee test timeout touch tr true truncate 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. If you obtained this file as part of a "git clone", then see the README-hacking file. If this file came to you as part of a tar archive, then see the file INSTALL for compilation and installation instructions. These programs are intended to conform to POSIX (with BSD and other extensions), like the rest of the GNU system. By default they conform to older POSIX (1003.2-1992), and therefore support obsolete usages like "head -10" and "chown owner.group file". This default is overridden at build-time by the value of 's _POSIX2_VERSION macro, and this in turn can be overridden at runtime as described in the documentation under "Standards conformance". 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 commit logs. 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 this package 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. ***************************************** On Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Darwin 9.1), test failure ----------------------------------------- Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Darwin 9.1) provides only partial (and incompatible) ACL support, so although "./configure && make" succeeds, "make check" exposes numerous failures. The solution is to turn off ACL support manually via "./configure --disable-acl". For details, see . ***************************************** Test failure with NLS and gettext <= 0.17 ----------------------------------------- Due to a conflict between libintl.h and gnulib's new xprintf module, when you configure with NLS support, and with a gettext installation older than 0.17.1 (not yet released, at the time of this writing), then some tests fail, at least on NetBSD 1.6. To work around it in the mean time, you can configure with --disable-nls. For details, see . *********************** Pre-C99 build failure ----------------------- There is a new, implicit build requirement: To build the coreutils from source, you should have a C99-conforming compiler, due to the use of declarations after non-declaration statements in several files in src/. There is code in configure to find and, if possible, enable an appropriate compiler. However, if configure doesn't find a C99 compiler, it continues nonetheless, and your build will fail. If that happens, simply[*] apply the included patch using the following command, and then run make again: cd src && patch < c99-to-c89.diff [*] however, as of coreutils-7.1, the "c99-to-c89.diff" file is no longer maintained, so even if the patches still apply, the result will be an incomplete conversion. It's been 10 years. Get a decent compiler! ;-) *********************** HPUX 11.x build failure ----------------------- A known problem exists when compiling on HPUX on both hppa and ia64 in 64-bit mode (i.e. +DD64) on HP-UX 11.0, 11.11, and 11.23. 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__ ************************ OSF/1 4.0d build failure ------------------------ If you use /usr/bin/make on an OSF/1 4.0d system, it will fail due to the presence of the "[" target. That version of make appears to treat "[" as some syntax relating to locks. To work around that, the best solution is to use GNU make. Otherwise, simply remove all mention of "[$(EXEEXT)" from src/Makefile. ********************** Running tests as root: ---------------------- If you run the tests as root, note that a few of them create files and/or run programs as a non-root user, `nobody' by default. If you want to use some other non-root username, specify it via the NON_ROOT_USERNAME environment variable. Depending on the permissions with which the working directories have been created, using `nobody' may fail, because that user won't have the required read and write access to the build and test directories. I find that it is best to unpack and build as a non-privileged user, and then to run the following command as that user in order to run the privilege-requiring tests: sudo env PATH="$PATH" NON_ROOT_USERNAME=$USER make -k check-root If you can run the tests as root, please do so and report any problems. We get much less test coverage in that mode, and it's arguably more important that these tools work well when run by root than when run by less privileged users. *************** Reporting bugs: --------------- IMPORTANT: if you take the time to report a test failure, please be sure to include the output of running `make check' in verbose mode for each failing test. For example, if the test that fails is tests/misc/df, then you would run this command: (cd tests && make check TESTS=misc/df VERBOSE=yes) >> log 2>&1 For some tests, you can get even more detail by adding DEBUG=yes. Then include the contents of the file `log' in your bug report. Send bug reports, questions, comments, etc. to bug-coreutils@gnu.org. If you would like to suggest a patch, see the files README-hacking and HACKING for tips. *************************************** There are 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 (or, better, relative to the latest sources in the public repository), an explanation for why the patch is necessary or useful, and if at all possible, enough information to reproduce whatever problem prompted it. Plus, you'll earn lots of karma if you include a test case to exercise any bug(s) you fix. Here are instructions for checking out the latest development sources: http://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=coreutils 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: Now that we use the ./bootstrap script, you should not run autoreconf manually. Doing that will overwrite essential source files with older versions, which may make the package unbuildable or introduce subtle bugs. 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 the tools listed in bootstrap.conf's buildreq string. All of these programs except `test' 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. ======================================================================== Copyright (C) 1998, 2002-2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.