coreutils-8.30

[Anton Maisak]

​ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.30.tar.xz

[Bruce Dubbs]

• Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]

Bug fixes

'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST. If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST, then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST. Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced, even if it points to SRC on a separate device. [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]

'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option. Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions that caused -u to sometimes override -n. [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]

'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc., and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged. Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files, and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created. [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]

'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink even if it can't be traversed. [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]

ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.

'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, ‘mv -n A A’ now silently does nothing if A exists. [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]

Changes in behavior

'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if it is self referential.

ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.

New features

cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.

env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about each processing step.

env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts (shebang lines).

md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping. This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.

rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.

Improvements

cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems. Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.

stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.

wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales, which is especially significant on macOS.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at revision 11433.