GNU Core Utilities - News: coreutils-8.31 released [stable]

coreutils-8.31 released [stable]

Item posted by Pádraig Brady <pixelbeat> on Mon 11 Mar 2019 12:48:38 AM UTC.

This is to announce coreutils-8.31, a stable release.
See the NEWS below for more details.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
The following people contributed changes to this release:

There have been 88 commits by 15 people in the 35 weeks since 8.30

  Achilles Gaikwad (1)            Jim Meyering (1)
  Assaf Gordon (7)                Martin Bukatovic (1)
  Ayappan (1)                     Martin Castillo (1)
  Bernhard Voelker (10)           Paul Eggert (24)
  Bjarni Ingi Gislason (1)        Pádraig Brady (39)
  Chih-Hsuan Yen (1)              Stéphane Campinas (1)
  Daming Yang (1)                 Wodry (1)
  Filipp Gunbin (1)

Pádraig [on behalf of the coreutils maintainers]

==================================================================

Here is the GNU coreutils home page:
    https://gnu.org/software/coreutils/

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  https://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v8.31
or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git shortlog v8.30..v8.31

To summarize the 480 gnulib-related changes, run these commands
from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git checkout v8.31
  git submodule summary v8.30

==================================================================

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.31.tar.xz
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.31.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/coreutils/coreutils-8.31.tar.xz
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/coreutils/coreutils-8.31.tar.xz.sig

[*] Use a .sig file 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-8.31.tar.xz.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 DF6FD971306037D9

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.69
  Automake 1.15
  Gnulib v0.1-2457-g188d87b
  Bison 3.0.4

NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

  When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
  after asking the user whether to proceed.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

  df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
  [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]

  seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
  for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]

  shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
  when outputting to less-common file types.  For example, the shell
  command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
  an "error truncating" diagnostic.
  [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
   (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]

  sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
  [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]

  'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]

  'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
  if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]

** Changes in behavior

  cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
  uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
  regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
  end-of-options marker.

  nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
  parameters follow.

  'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
  marker as before: 'a -- b'.

  echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
  environment variable is set.

  When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
  if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking.  This
  uses fewer system calls and avoids some races.  The old statting
  approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
  are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).

  ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.

  'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore.  Long ago, there were concerns about
  the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
  operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'.  Scripts using it were
  already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.

  wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
  unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.

** New features

  id now supports specifying multiple users.

  'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
  introduced in POSIX.1-2017.

  printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
  numbers in either the current or the C locale.  For example, if the
  current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
  now mean the same thing.  Previously, these commands accepted only
  C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point.  The new behavior is
  more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.

  test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
  whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.

  env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
  '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.

  env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
  signal handling before executing a program.

** New commands

  basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
  and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
  base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.

** Improvements

  ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
  which is common in Asian locales.

  stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
  stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.

  stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
  on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.