1.23.  coreutils

previously, it was not possible to compile coreutils without SELinux support. This has been fixed so that removing the "--enable-selinux" option from the spec file allows coreutils to compile successfully. (BZ#488730)

the "join" utility, which joins two text files, or a file and standard input, on a line-by-line basis, could experience a segmentation fault when running under a multibyte locale. In addition, multibyte locales could cause "join" to produce unexpected results. With this updated package, these coding errors have been corrected so that "join" completes correctly and successfully when run under a multibyte locale. (BZ#497368)

the "df" utility reports the disk usage of a directory within a file system. Using "df" on a directory which contained autofs mount points under it did not cause autofs to mount those directories, which resulted in "df" not factoring in the disk usage of those automount directories. With this update, invoking the "df" command does trigger automount, which in turn results in a correct disk usage count. (BZ#497830)

several other utilities in the coreutils package possessed undocumented options, which could have led to user confusion. Those undocumented options have been removed from their respective utilities, thus reducing the possibility for confusion. (BZ#468030)

the "chmod", "chown" and "chgrp" commands all take the following options, which have the same effect: "-f", "--silent" and "--quiet". These flags cause the command to suppress most error messages. However, calling the command with one of these options on a non-existent file caued the command to output the following message: "No such file or directory". These options now suppress error messages when called on non-existent files. (BZ#474220)

the tail(1) man page contained a formatting error and a typo, both of which have been rectified. (BZ#470788)

the rm(1) man page stated that the "rm" command possessed a "--directory" ('-d') option, whose purpose was to allow the removal of directories, including non-empty directories. However, invoking "rm --directory [dir]" always resulted in the following error message: "rm: cannot remove `some_dir': Is a directory". The rm(1) man page has been corrected and no longer lists "--directory" as an option. The recommended switch for recursively removing a directory and its contents is "--recursive" ('-r'). (BZ#473472)

the coreutils package's locale directories were not owned by the coreutils package. This has been corrected by ensuring that all locale directories are owned by the package. (BZ#481804)

the '-v' option of the "ls" command sorts directory listings based upon version numbers. However, "ls -v" did not sort vmlinuz-[version] files from the /boot/ directory in the correct order. This updated coreutils package enhances both "ls -v" and "sort -V" so that they are now able to sort /boot/vmlinuz-[version] files correctly. (BZ#253817)

the "install" command now supports the "--compare" ('-c') flag, which causes "install" to compare each pair of source and destination files and, if the destination file's content is identical to the source (and disregarding any discrepancy between the owner, group, permissions and possibly SELinux context) then the destination file is not modified and the modification time is left unchanged. (BZ#453447)

the "cp" and "mv" utilities now support the preservation of extended attributes on files and directories. In addition, Access Control Lists (ACLs) are now preserved when copying or moving files (with "cp" or "mv") to or from NFSv4-mounted file systems. (BZ#454072)