restore djgpp, eventually merge TODO lists add unit tests for lib/*.c Implement chown, chmod, using fts. Implement POSIX-required -L, -H, -P options for chown strip: add an option to specify the program used to strip binaries. suggestion from Karl Berry doc/coreutils.texi: Address this comment: FIXME: mv's behavior in this case is system-dependent Better still: fix the code so it's *not* system-dependent. implement --target-directory=DIR for install (per texinfo documentation) ls: add --format=FORMAT option that controls how each line is printed. cp --no-preserve=X should not attempt to preserve attribute X reported by Andreas Schwab copy.c: Address the FIXME-maybe comment in copy_internal. And once that's done, add an exclusion so that `cp --link' no longer incurs the overhead of saving src. dev/ino and dest. filename in the hash table. See if we can be consistent about where --verbose sends its output: These all send --verbose output to stdout: head, tail, rm, cp, mv, ln, chmod, chown, chgrp, install, ln These send it to stderr: shred mkdir split readlink is different Write an autoconf test to work around build failure in HPUX's 64-bit mode. See notes in README -- and remove them once there's a work-around. Integrate use of sendfile, suggested here: http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fileutils/2003-03/msg00030.html I don't plan to do that, since a few tests demonstrate no significant benefit. Should printf '\0123' print "\n3"? per report from TAKAI Kousuke on Mar 27 http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-03/index.html printf: consider adapting builtins/printf.def from bash df: add `--total' option, suggested here http://bugs.debian.org/186007 seq: give better diagnostics for invalid formats: e.g. no or too many % directives seq: consider allowing format string to contain no %-directives dd: consider adding an option to suppress `bytes/block read/written' output to stderr. Suggested here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165045 m4: rename all macros that start with AC_ to start with another prefix resolve RH report on cp -a forwarded by Tim Waugh Martin Michlmayr's patch to provide ls with `--sort directory' option tail: don't use xlseek; it *exits*. Instead, maybe use a macro and return nonzero. add mktemp? Suggested by Nelson Beebe Now that AC_FUNC_LSTAT and AC_FUNC_STAT are in autoconf, remove m4/stat.m4 and m4/lstat.m4. df: alignment problem of `Used' heading with e.g., -mP reported by Karl Berry tr: support nontrivial equivalence classes, e.g. [=e=] with LC_COLLATE=fr_FR fix tail -f to work with named pipes; reported by Ian D. Allen $ mkfifo j; tail -f j & sleep 1; echo x > j ./tail: j: file truncated ./tail: j: cannot seek to offset 0: Illegal seek lib/strftime.c: Since %N is the only format that we need but that glibc's strftime doesn't support, consider using a wrapper that would expand /%(-_)?\d*N/ to the desired string and then pass the resulting string to glibc's strftime. sort: Compress temporary files when doing large external sort/merges. This improves performance when you can compress/uncompress faster than you can read/write, which is common in these days of fast CPUs. suggestion from Charles Randall on 2001-08-10 sort: Add an ordering option -R that causes 'sort' to sort according to a random permutation of the correct sort order. Also, add an option --random-seed=SEED that causes 'sort' to use an arbitrary string SEED to select which permutations to use, in a deterministic manner: that is, if you sort a permutation of the same input file with the same --random-seed=SEED option twice, you'll get the same output. The default SEED is chosen at random, and contains enough information to ensure that the output permutation is random. suggestion from Feth AREZKI, Stephan Kasal, and Paul Eggert on 2003-07-17 unexpand: [http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/unexpand.html] printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 8,9 should print its input, unmodified. printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 5,8 should print "x\ty\n" Let GNU su use the `wheel' group if appropriate. (there are a couple patches, already) sort: Investigate better sorting algorithms; see Knuth vol. 3. We tried list merge sort, but it was about 50% slower than the recursive algorithm currently used by sortlines, and it used more comparisons. We're not sure why this was, as the theory suggests it should do fewer comparisons, so perhaps this should be revisited. List merge sort was implemented in the style of Knuth algorithm 5.2.4L, with the optimization suggested by exercise 5.2.4-22. The test case was 140,213,394 bytes, 426,4424 lines, text taken from the GCC 3.3 distribution, sort.c compiled with GCC 2.95.4 and running on Debian 3.0r1 GNU/Linux, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, single pass with no temporary files and plenty of RAM. Since comparisons seem to be the bottleneck, perhaps the best algorithm to try next should be merge insertion. See Knuth section 5.3.1, who credits Lester Ford, Jr. and Selmer Johnson, American Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959), 387-389. doc/coreutils.texi: Document the exit status of each and every program. Suggestion from Dan Jacobson. The sentence or two describing the common case must appear just once, and then it must be made to appear in the 70+ places where it's needed. du: rewrite to use something other than nftw to perform directory traversal. Due to design limitations of nftw, ... using -D makes du dereference each command line argument that is a symlink to a directory. A symlink to non-directory is not dereferenced. cp --recursive: perform dir traversals in source and dest hierarchy rather than forming full file names. The latter (current) approach fails unnecessarily when the names become very long. `tail --follow=name --retry' should elicit a diagnostic, since no file name was specified. du and wc: add an option to make them read NUL-delimited file name arguments from a file. du: warn that -H is going to change to POSIX meaning (not --si) tail --p is now ambiguous patch from Olivier Delhomme du: add option to use \0 as line terminator rather than \n so that tools like xdiskusage that parse du output don't choke on file names with embedded newlines.