Following is a mail announcing the release of GNU Coreutils 6.00 from the info-gnu list (http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu). It seems that this version has fixed a segmentation fault related problem while using 'shred' on Gentoo systems. I though some Gentoo lover would find this useful.

Message: 1 Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 17:27:40 +0200 From: Jim Meyering jim@meyering.net Subject: coreutils-6.0 released To: info-gnu@gnu.org, coreutils-announce@gnu.org Cc: translation@iro.umontreal.ca, bug-coreutils@gnu.org Message-ID: 873bbyggsz.fsf@rho.meyering.net Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Coreutils version 6.0 has been released.

If you haven't heard about the GNU coreutils, the FAQ is a good place to start: http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/

Coreutils development branched after the stable 5.92 release. Since then, there have been five releases from the stable branch: 5.93 through 5.97. I hope to make no more releases from that branch.

Coreutils 6.0 is the first release off the trunk since 5.92, and considering the number and scope of the changes, I've labeled it "unstable". However, many of the changes have been for improved robustness and portability, and even the bug fixes usually address unlikely failure scenarios. That said, the changes are numerous enough and invasive enough that there are probably a few new bugs.

There is a new, implicit build requirement: To build the coreutils from source, you should have a C99-conforming compiler, due to the use of declarations after non-declaration statements in remove.c. There is code in configure to find and, if possible, enable an appropriate compiler. However, if configure doesn't find a C99 compiler, it continues nonetheless, and your build will fail. If that happens, simply patch remove.c with the following command, and run make again:

cd src && patch remove.c c99-to-c89.diff

Here are some highlights from the NEWS below:

There are six new programs:

base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality by Simon Josefsson

sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum by David Madore (based on work by Ulrich Drepper and Scott Miller)

shuf: shuffle lines of text by Paul Eggert

We've finally added some often-requested functionality for ls, with its new option: --group-directories-first, by Francesco Montorsi.

rm has a new -I option, added by Eric Blake: rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection against mistakes.

For the complete summary of changes, see the NEWS section below.

Special thanks to Paul Eggert for his many contributions. Thanks to everyone else who contributed changes (attributions are in the ChangeLog files), reported problems, and helped by fielding questions on the mailing list.

---------------------------------------------------------------- The GNU coreutils package contains the following programs:

[ base64 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 ginstall groups head hostid hostname id 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 sha224sum sha256sum sha384sum sha512sum shred shuf 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

Here are the compressed sources: ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.0.tar.gz (7.9MB) ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.0.tar.bz2 (5.1MB)

Here are the xdelta-style diffs: ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.92-6.0.xdelta (1.9MB)

<snip>

shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems

sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32, on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20, SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.

tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)

NB: I removed part of the original post since I was afraid that it was too long to be blocked by the lists. Neither could I give a link since the post has not yet been archived.

Cheerio, Debarshi