Release Digest: GNU, March 14, 2004

coreutils-5.2.1

I am happy to announce a stable release of the GNU coreutils. The GNU coreutils package is the combination of and replacement for the fileutils, sh-utils, and textutils packages. This package contains the following programs:

[ basename cat chgrp chmod chown chroot cksum comm cp csplit cut date dd df dir dircolors dirname du echo env expand expr factor false fmt fold groups head hostid hostname id install join kill link ln logname ls md5sum mkdir mkfifo mknod mv nice nl nohup od paste pathchk pinky pr printenv printf ptx pwd readlink rm rmdir seq sha1sum shred sleep sort split stat stty su sum sync tac tail tee test touch tr true tsort tty uname unexpand uniq unlink uptime users vdir wc who whoami yes

I consider this to be a bug-fix-only release, in spite of the item listed under `New features' below. Special thanks to Paul Eggert for all of his patches and to Dmitri V. Levin for the nohup fix. See the ChangeLog files for complete details.

Here are the compressed sources:
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.1.tar.gz (6.3MB)
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.1.tar.bz2 (4.1MB)
http://fetish.sf.net/coreutils-5.2.1.tar.gz (6.3MB)
http://fetish.sf.net/coreutils-5.2.1.tar.bz2 (4.1MB)

Here are the xdelta-style diffs:
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.0-5.2.1.xdelta (304KB)
http://fetish.sf.net/coreutils-5.2.0-5.2.1.xdelta (304KB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures:
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.1.tar.gz.asc
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.1.tar.bz2.asc
http://fetish.sf.net/coreutils-5.2.1.tar.gz.asc
http://fetish.sf.net/coreutils-5.2.1.tar.bz2.asc

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 signatures:

83a485c9fa9e18903351d7b51bdc5719 coreutils-5.2.1.tar.gz
172ee3c315af93d3385ddfbeb843c53f coreutils-5.2.1.tar.bz2
4891763cb563d55d70802a304efdae3b coreutils-5.2.0-5.2.1.xdelta
7d8a29c9b93c66f4702ccd2b462336d499533c6d coreutils-5.2.1.tar.gz
1028755ae0fa9be840576e4837004cf5a9981c45 coreutils-5.2.1.tar.bz2
0adca939304195084b16c16ae046e8c80b711647 coreutils-5.2.0-5.2.1.xdelta/

NEWS

• Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
  • Bug fixes

    mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two or more arguments between partitions.

    `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create holes in the destination.

    nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &', and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session terminates immediately.

    `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:

    Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.

    The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" | ""' now returns 0, not the empty string.

    The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g., `expr 1 | 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.

• New features

  `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.