coreutils-9.1

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]

Bug fixes

• chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks. All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect. [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]

• If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B, cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context before adjusting it to the correct value. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]

• 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B. Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]

• On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system and B is in some other file system. [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]

• On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

• 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]

• 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+" or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension, and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]

• On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported" when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system. [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]

• 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]

Changes in behavior

• cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.

• chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f", which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".". Applications should use ":" instead of ".".

• cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names, so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
• date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.

• dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error, and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.

• dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B". For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented, though they still work.

• ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.

• ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.

• stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32. Only stat --cached=never will continue to automount files.

• timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.

New Features

• dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N, like FreeBSD and other operating systems.

• dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.

• dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.

Improvements

• cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory. This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.

• On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g., 'cp -p', 'cp -a').

• The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.

• With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data, since synchronizing can take a long time.

• printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.

• sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.

• 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.

• root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode, now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.

Build-related

• AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.

[Xi Ruoyao]

i18n patch rebased and pushed to patches.git as coreutils/coreutils-9.1-i18n-1.patch.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at commit 813ab55675c99ee4040c38ee468d4bf9b70bdd19

Package updates and nobody uid change.
    Change nobody/nogroup uid/git to 65534.
    Update to meson-0.62.1.
    Update to libpipeline-1.5.6.
    Update to elfutils-0.187.
    Update to Jinja2-3.1.2.
    Update to vim-8.2.4814.
    Update to sysvinit-3.03.
    Update to linux-5.17.5.
    Update to gcc-11.3.0.
    Update to coreutils-9.1.
    Update to bc-5.2.4.