GNU Core Utilities 5.92 review

The GNU Core Utilities are the basic file, shell and text manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 7319K Developer: GNU Core Utilities Team

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The GNU Core Utilities are the basic file, shell and text manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system. These are the core utilities which are expected to exist on every operating system.

Previously these utilities were offered as three individual sets of GNU utilities, fileutils, shellutils, and textutils. Those three have been combined into a single set of utilities called the coreutils.

These programs are intended to conform to POSIX (with BSD and other extensions), like the rest of the GNU system. By default they conform to older POSIX (1003.2-1992), and therefore support obsolete usages like "head -10" and "chown owner.group file". This default is overridden at build-time by the value of < unistd.h >'s _POSIX2_VERSION macro, and this in turn can be overridden at runtime as described in the documentation under "Standards conformance".

The ls, dir, and vdir commands are all separate executables instead of one program that checks argv[0] because people often rename these programs to things like gls, gnuls, l, etc. Renaming a program file shouldn't affect how it operates, so that people can get the behavior they want with whatever name they want.

Special thanks to Paul Eggert, Brian Matthews, Bruce Evans, Karl Berry, Kaveh Ghazi, and Fran?ois Pinard for help with debugging and porting these programs. Many thanks to all of the people who have taken the time to submit problem reports and fixes. All contributed changes are attributed in the ChangeLog files.

And thanks to the following people who have provided accounts for portability testing on many different types of systems: Bob Proulx, Christian Robert, Fran?ois Pinard, Greg McGary, Harlan Stenn, Joel N. Weber, Mark D. Roth, Matt Schalit, Nelson H. F. Beebe, R?jean Payette, Sam Tardieu.

Thanks to Michael Stone for inflicting test releases of this package on Debian's unstable distribution, and to all the kind folks who used that distribution and found and reported bugs.

Note that each man page is now automatically generated from a template and from the corresponding --help usage message. Patches to the template files (man/*.x) are welcome. However, the authoritative documentation is in texinfo form in the doc directory.