GNU Core Utilities 9.12 Released

Pádraig Brady has announced the release of GNU Core Utilities 9.12 — the set of basic command-line tools without which practically no Unix-like system is conceivable. In the 21 weeks since the 9.11 release, 288 commits were contributed to the project by 16 people.

New features

The uname utility has gained a -A option that prints all available information about the system, tagging each value with an explanatory label. This comes in handy when you need to quickly figure out what a given line in the output actually means.

In addition, stat and tail have learned to recognize file systems of the failfs and nullfs types, which makes their behavior more predictable when working with these environments.

Bug fixes

The release includes a host of fixes. Among them is one that is especially noteworthy: a bug has been eliminated that, in the developers' own words, had been present in the code literally “from the very beginning.” Because of it, some utilities would fail while traversing a directory tree if files were being deleted by another process at the same time. Given the venerable age of coreutils, tracking down and clearing out a defect that had survived to the present day from the earliest versions is a remarkable event in its own right.

GNU coreutils brings together the tools everyone is familiar with, such as ls, cp, cat, stat, and uname, so even small improvements and fixes in this package one way or another affect all users of Linux and other systems where it is used.

Source: LWN.net