[ILUG-BOM] Coreutils version 6.0 has been released.

[Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray]

Following is a mail announcing the release of GNU Coreutils 6.00 from
the info-gnu list (http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu). It
seems that this version has fixed a segmentation fault related problem
while using 'shred' on Gentoo systems. I though some Gentoo lover
would find this useful.

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 17:27:40 +0200
From: Jim Meyering <jim at meyering.net>
Subject: coreutils-6.0 released
To: info-gnu at gnu.org, coreutils-announce at gnu.org
Cc: translation at iro.umontreal.ca, bug-coreutils at gnu.org
Message-ID: <873bbyggsz.fsf at rho.meyering.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Coreutils version 6.0 has been released.

If you haven't heard about the GNU coreutils, the FAQ is a good
place to start: http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/

Coreutils development branched after the stable 5.92 release.
Since then, there have been five releases from the stable branch:
5.93 through 5.97.  I hope to make no more releases from that branch.

Coreutils 6.0 is the first release off the trunk since 5.92, and
considering the number and scope of the changes, I've labeled it
"unstable".  However, many of the changes have been for improved
robustness and portability, and even the bug fixes usually address
unlikely failure scenarios.  That said, the changes are numerous
enough and invasive enough that there are probably a few new bugs.

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 remove.c.  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 patch remove.c with the following command,
and run make again:

 cd src && patch remove.c c99-to-c89.diff

Here are some highlights from the NEWS below:

There are six new programs:

 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality
   by Simon Josefsson

 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
   by David Madore (based on work by Ulrich Drepper and Scott Miller)

 shuf: shuffle lines of text
   by Paul Eggert

We've finally added some often-requested functionality for ls,
with its new option: --group-directories-first, by Francesco Montorsi.

rm has a new -I option, added by Eric Blake:
 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option.  This new option
 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
 against mistakes.

For the complete summary of changes, see the NEWS section below.


Special thanks to Paul Eggert for his many contributions.
Thanks to everyone else who contributed changes (attributions are
in the ChangeLog files), reported problems, and helped by fielding
questions on the mailing list.

----------------------------------------------------------------
The GNU coreutils package contains the following programs:

 [ base64 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
 sha224sum sha256sum sha384sum sha512sum shred shuf 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

Here are the compressed sources:
 ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.0.tar.gz   (7.9MB)
 ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.0.tar.bz2   (5.1MB)

Here are the xdelta-style diffs:
 ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.92-6.0.xdelta   (1.9MB)

<snip>

 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems

 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
 mkstemp function.  sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.

 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)

NB: I removed part of the original post since I was afraid that it was
too long to be blocked by the lists. Neither could I give a link since
the post has not yet been archived.

Cheerio,
Debarshi
-- 
"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep.
That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?"

                                     -Jean Kerr