coreutils-7.0 released (beta)

[Jim Meyering]

Coreutils version 7.0 has been released.

Considering the two new programs, and that several of the existing
programs acquired new options or other non-trivial improvements,
this qualifies as a feature release and gets the "beta" label.
However, most changes have been local and well-tested.

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v6.12
or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git shortlog v6.12..v7.0

To summarize the gnulib-related changes, run this command from a
git-cloned gnulib directory:
git shortlog b9c1b3ae9d1cb02e7712988570355d4258f1bcb0\
..785dc8ba76a688c5746d230dc5b7d4102d42ab4c


Here are the compressed sources:
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-7.0.tar.gz   (9.0MB)
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-7.0.tar.lzma   (3.8MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-7.0.tar.gz.sig
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-7.0.tar.lzma.sig

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

a0b9aa9edd52b4efe9c8adb0cf622e79  coreutils-7.0.tar.gz
81c7aecc0daa6cada78005108edb6502  coreutils-7.0.tar.lzma
93b29fb84cc89f81a6c82d326c091600fde8a9d0  coreutils-7.0.tar.gz
8c122d454780401302d6b8a215b33c9d438a8178  coreutils-7.0.tar.lzma

[*] You can use either of the above signature files 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-7.0.tar.gz.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 B9AB9A16

and rerun the `gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.63
  Automake 1.10a
  Bison 2.3
  Gnulib v0.0-1166-g785dc8b

*****************
How can you help?
*****************
If you're interested in lending a hand, or just want to use
the latest versions right now, you can build these programs
and run the test suite like this:

   gzip -dc coreutils-7.0.tar.gz | tar xf -
   cd coreutils-7.0
   ./configure
   make
   make -k check >& log
   grep FAIL log

[If you downloaded the much-smaller .lzma tarball, then just
 substitute this for the gzip... line above:
   lzma -dc coreutils-7.0.tar.lzma | tar xf -
 If you don't have "lzma" installed yet, first try getting it via
 your distribution, e.g., "aptitude install lzma" or "yum install lzma"]

Be sure to use make's -k option so that make doesn't stop
just because one of the earlier tests fails.
Please report any build problems or test failures to the
address@hidden mailing list.
There are detailed instructions in the `Reporting bugs:' section
of the README file.

*****************
NEWS (since coreutils-7.0)
*****************

* Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]

** New programs

  timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
  truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.

** New features

  chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
  even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
  systems.  Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
  per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
  Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
  from the newer version of fts in gnulib.

  comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order.  This check can
  be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.

  comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
  of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.

  cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.

  dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
  With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
  until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.

  df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
  arguments after all arguments have been processed.

  If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
  expr support arbitrarily large numbers.  Pollard's rho algorithm is
  used to factor large numbers.

  install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
  strip binaries.

  ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available

  ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)

  md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
  'OK' messages.  sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.

  sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
  containing a null-separated list of files to sort.  This list is used
  instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
  maximum command-line (argv) length.

  sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
  represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
  When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.

  sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
  specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.

** Bug fixes

  chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message

  od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3).  This is
  probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.

  seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
  Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.

  shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI

  shuf --head-count is now correctly documented.  The documentation
  previously claimed it was called --head-lines.

** Improvements

  Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
  HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
  of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.

  join has significantly better performance due to better memory management

  ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
  no matter how many files are in a given directory

  od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
  specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
  padding the input out to the least common multiple width.

** Changes in behavior

  stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
  Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.

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