coreutils-6.11 released

[Jim Meyering]

Coreutils version 6.11 has been released.  This is a stable release.

Since 6.10, there have been 200 change sets in coreutils proper and almost
300 in gnulib (most of the files in coreutils/{lib,m4} come from gnulib).

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release.
This time, a trio from Stanford, Cristian Cadar, Daniel Dunbar and
Dawson Engler deserve special thanks for discovering an amazing number
of bugs (usually segfault-inducing), one in each of the following tools:
pr, md5sum (also affecting sha*sum), mknod, mkfifo, mkdir, paste and ptx.

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v6.11
or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git shortlog v6.10..v6.11

To summarize the gnulib-related changes, you can run this command
From a git-cloned gnulib directory:
git shortlog 16c6ed60fb53998428f510f649ee6b57fea30f35\
..2e8956774250d3f5636898fea193c5abaf041d08

Here are the compressed sources:
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.11.tar.gz     (8.8MB)
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.11.tar.lzma   (3.6MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.11.tar.gz.sig
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.11.tar.lzma.sig

For more information on LZMA compression, see <http://tukaani.org/lzma/>.
Since the lzma-compressed tarball is 2MB smaller than the .bz2 one,
and since it decompresses twice as fast, I no longer create bzip2-
compressed tarballs.

[*] You can use either of the above signature files 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-6.11.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys B9AB9A16

and rerun the `gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.62
  Automake 1.10a
  Bison 2.3a
  Gnulib v0.0-513-g2e89567

*****************
How can you help?
*****************
If you're interested in lending a hand, or just want to use
the latest versions right now, you can build these programs
and run the test suite like this:

   gzip -dc coreutils-6.11.tar.gz | tar xf -
   cd coreutils-6.11
   ./configure
   make
   make -k check >& log
   grep FAIL log

[If you downloaded the much-smaller .lzma tarball, then just
 substitute this for the gzip... line above:
   lzma -dc coreutils-6.11.tar.lzma | tar xf -
 If you don't have "lzma" installed yet, first try getting it via
 your distribution, e.g., "aptitude install lzma" or "yum install lzma"]

Be sure to use make's -k option so that make doesn't stop
just because one of the earlier tests fails.
Please report any build problems or test failures to the
address@hidden mailing list.
There are detailed instructions in the `Reporting bugs:' section
of the README file.

*****************
NEWS (since coreutils-6.10)
*****************

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.

  "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E.  Before this fix, using
  -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
  with EEXIST.  Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
  to create the destination file.  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]

  dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
  of=/dev/stdout.  [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]

  id now uses getgrouplist, when possible.  This results in
  much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.

  ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
  of libselinux.  E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.

  md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
  echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c -  Now, md5sum ignores that line.
  sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]

  md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
  and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
  and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
  Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
  sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
  [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]

  "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
  mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly.  Now they're fixed.

  mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
  when the destination had two or more hard links.  It no longer does that.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

  "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
  stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]

  "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
  [bug present in the original version, in 1992]

  "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
  the heap.  That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
  at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
  --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).

  "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
  prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).

  "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
  in more cases when a directory is empty.

  "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
  rather than reporting the invalid string format.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]

** New features

  join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order.  This check can
  be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.

  sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
  general-numeric, month, numeric or random.  These are equivalent to the
  options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
  and --random-sort/-R, resp.

** Improvements

  id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
  would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.

  ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences

  seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.

** Portability

  rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
  which have negative errno values.

** Consistency

  install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
  not to stderr.

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