The developers around Pádraig “pixelbeat” Brady have released version 9 of the GNU Core Utilities. Every GNU / Linux user at some point stumbles across terminal commands like ls, cat, cp, rm and dd. These basic commands of any Unix or Unix-like system are standardized and summarized in the GNU Core Utilities.
The individual programs, which are emphatically simple according to the Unix philosophy, have been around for over 30 years (at that time still file, sh and text utils, for 20 years coreutils) – you would think that they have matured so slowly and without errors . Compared to the previous version, the GNU Core Utilities 8.32 from March 2020, around half of the changes concern pure error corrections, only the other half are changes in behavior, new functions and other improvements.
Many mistakes weeded out
Some fixed bugs concern the incorrect output of some commands, for example produces df no more double output for some remote mounts. Also fixed are crashes of du on XFS file systems, if they experience major changes in the directory structure while the program is running – for whatever reason you want to do both at the same time.
More annoying was a mistake of rm, which sometimes skipped files when trying to delete an empty directory – the error arose when parts of rm completely rewrote it in Core Utilities 8.0. The latter happened 12 years ago – sounds like a long-cherished bug? It can be done even better: Another two years older is a bug introduced by Core Utilities 6.9.91 ls when viewing SELinux information.
Changes and innovations
work cp or install on a CoW file system (copy-on-write, e.g. ZFS, XFS and Btrfs), they also use this feature. There is something new at cksum for 32-bit CRCs of files or data streams. Via the parameter --algorithm=TYPE (short -a) you can select which algorithm should be used for the checksum. Possible are sysv (is equivalent to sum -s), bsd (is equivalent to sum -r), the previous one crc and various SHA algorithms. That is new sm3-Algorithm. Practical in this context: With cksum --check tries cksum to automatically recognize which algorithm was used for a checksum. Overall should cksum run four to eight times faster with some optimizations.
Finally someone found himself who can use WordCount (wc) optimized with the help of the Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2), which are available from the Haswell CPU family. AVX2 extends the SSE and AVX vector instructions for integers to 256 bits. If AVX2 is available on the CPU, it is rewarded wc According to the developer, this is up to five times faster when counting line breaks.
Try it out now
Most current GNU / Linux distributions use the GNU Core Utilities in an 8.3x version. Anyone already looking at the new features want to throw, can do this with user rights:
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.0.tar.gz
tar -xf coreutils-9.0.tar.gz
cd coreutils-9.0/
./configure && make -j $(nproc)The binaries are located in the coreutils-9.0 / src directory and can be accessed via
~/coreutils-9.0/src/ls --version
ls (GNU coreutils) 9.0
Copyright (C) 2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later [...]be called. The brave can use it sudo make install install in your system.
(fo)