coreutils-9.5 released [stable]

[Pádraig Brady]

This is to announce coreutils-9.5, a stable release.
See the NEWS below for a summary of changes.

There have been 187 commits by 18 people in the 30 weeks since 9.4.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
The following people contributed changes to this release:

  Aearil (1)                      Petr Malat (1)
  Bruno Haible (3)                Pádraig Brady (75)
  Christian Göttsche (1)          Samuel Tardieu (1)
  Collin Funk (4)                 Stephane Chazelas (1)
  Daan De Meyer (1)               Stephen Kitt (1)
  Greg Wooledge (1)               Sylvestre Ledru (3)
  Grisha Levit (2)                Ville Skyttä (1)
  Michel Lind (1)                 dann frazier (1)
  Paul Eggert (89)                lvgenggeng (1)

Pádraig [on behalf of the coreutils maintainers]
==================================================================

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

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  https://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v9.5
or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git shortlog v9.4..v9.5

Here are the compressed sources:
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.5.tar.gz   (15MB)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.5.tar.xz   (5.8MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures:
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.5.tar.gz.sig
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.5.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:

  3285114d93b39e5e4643b0846f570203a5e4c97b  coreutils-9.5.tar.gz
  dnrmoilQ7ELzul98Heed0ngA7o6bhkLaXe21l0oXQeU=  coreutils-9.5.tar.gz
  867fed7ce2ee15c5150a355a5f3a3b50578cf78d  coreutils-9.5.tar.xz
  zTKO3qyS9qZl3p8yPJO3Eq8YWLwuDYjz9xAEaUcKG4o=  coreutils-9.5.tar.xz

Verify the base64 SHA256 checksum with cksum -a sha256 --check
from coreutils-9.2 or OpenBSD's cksum since 2007.

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-9.5.tar.gz.sig

The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:

  pub   rsa4096/0xDF6FD971306037D9 2011-09-23 [SC]
        Key fingerprint = 6C37 DC12 121A 5006 BC1D  B804 DF6F D971 3060 37D9
  uid                   [ultimate] Pádraig Brady <P@draigBrady.com>
  uid                   [ultimate] Pádraig Brady <pixelbeat@gnu.org>

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

  gpg --locate-external-key P@draigBrady.com

  gpg --recv-keys DF6FD971306037D9

  wget -q -O- 
'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=coreutils&download=1'
 | gpg --import -

As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
keyring:

  wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
  gpg --keyring gnu-keyring.gpg --verify coreutils-9.5.tar.gz.sig

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.72c.32-cb6fb
  Automake 1.16.5
  Gnulib v0.1-7293-g259829e78b
  Bison 3.8.2

NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 9.5 (2024-03-28) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  chmod -R now avoids a race where an attacker may replace a traversed file
  with a symlink, causing chmod to operate on an unintended file.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

  cp, mv, and install no longer issue spurious diagnostics like "failed
  to preserve ownership" when copying to GNU/Linux CIFS file systems.
  They do this by working around some Linux CIFS bugs.

  cp --no-preserve=mode will correctly maintain set-group-ID bits
  for created directories.  Previously on systems that didn't support ACLs,
  cp would have reset the set-group-ID bit on created directories.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]

  join and uniq now support multi-byte characters better.
  For example, 'join -tX' now works even if X is a multi-byte character,
  and both programs now treat multi-byte characters like U+3000
  IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE as blanks if the current locale treats them so.

  numfmt options like --suffix no longer have an arbitrary 127-byte limit.
  [bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]

  mktemp with --suffix now better diagnoses templates with too few X's.
  Previously it conflated the insignificant --suffix in the error.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]

  sort again handles thousands grouping characters in single-byte locales
  where the grouping character is greater than CHAR_MAX.  For e.g. signed
  character platforms with a 0xA0 (aka &nbsp) grouping character.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]

  split --line-bytes with a mixture of very long and short lines
  no longer overwrites the heap (CVE-2024-0684).
  [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]

  tail no longer mishandles input from files in /proc and /sys file systems,
  on systems with a page size larger than the stdio BUFSIZ.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

  timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might kill arbitrary
  processes after a failed process fork.
  [bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]

  timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might fail to
  kill monitored processes immediately after forking them.
  [bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]

  wc no longer fails to count unprintable characters as parts of words.
  [bug introduced in textutils-2.1]

** Changes in behavior

  base32 and base64 no longer require padding when decoding.
  Previously an error was given for non padded encoded data.

  base32 and base64 have improved detection of corrupted encodings.
  Previously encodings with non zero padding bits were accepted.

  basenc --base16 -d now supports lower case hexadecimal characters.
  Previously an error was given for lower case hex digits.

  cp --no-clobber, and mv -n no longer exit with failure status if
  existing files are encountered in the destination.  Instead they revert
  to the behavior from before v9.2, silently skipping existing files.

  ls --dired now implies long format output without hyperlinks enabled,
  and will take precedence over previously specified formats or hyperlink mode.

  numfmt will accept lowercase 'k' to indicate Kilo or Kibi units on input,
  and uses lowercase 'k' when outputting such units in '--to=si' mode.

  pinky no longer tries to canonicalize the user's login location by default,
  rather requiring the new --lookup option to enable this often slow feature.

  wc no longer ignores encoding errors when counting words.
  Instead, it treats them as non white space.

** New features

  chgrp now accepts the --from=OWNER:GROUP option to restrict changes to files
  with matching current OWNER and/or GROUP, as already supported by chown(1).

  chmod adds support for -h, -H,-L,-P, and --dereference options, providing
  more control over symlink handling.  This supports more secure handling of
  CLI arguments, and is more consistent with chown, and chmod on other systems.

  cp now accepts the --keep-directory-symlink option (like tar), to preserve
  and follow existing symlinks to directories in the destination.

  cp and mv now accept the --update=none-fail option, which is similar
  to the --no-clobber option, except that existing files are diagnosed,
  and the command exits with failure status if existing files.
  The -n,--no-clobber option is best avoided due to platform differences.

  env now accepts the -a,--argv0 option to override the zeroth argument
  of the command being executed.

  mv now accepts an --exchange option, which causes the source and
  destination to be exchanged.  It should be combined with
  --no-target-directory (-T) if the destination is a directory.
  The exchange is atomic if source and destination are on a single
  file system that supports atomic exchange; --exchange is not yet
  supported in other situations.

  od now supports printing IEEE half precision floating point with -t fH,
  or brain 16 bit floating point with -t fB, where supported by the compiler.

  tail now supports following multiple processes, with repeated --pid options.

** Improvements

  cp,mv,install,cat,split now read and write a minimum of 256KiB at a time.
  This was previously 128KiB and increasing to 256KiB was seen to increase
  throughput by 10-20% when reading cached files on modern systems.

  env,kill,timeout now support unnamed signals. kill(1) for example now
  supports sending such signals, and env(1) will list them appropriately.

  SELinux operations in file copy operations are now more efficient,
  avoiding unneeded MCS/MLS label translation.

  sort no longer dynamically links to libcrypto unless -R is used.
  This decreases startup overhead in the typical case.

  wc is now much faster in single-byte locales and somewhat faster in
  multi-byte locales.

-
Also posted at https://savannah.gnu.org/news/?id=10612