This status update (subscribe via RSS) comes about 4 months after the last one, and coincides with release 8.12. Note also the bug tracker which records additions, feature requests and issues.

Rejected ideas

Some of the hardest work on coreutils is knowing what to reject and providing appropriate justification to the contributors. The contributions below all came since the last update and while good ideas, they were not included for various reasons detailed on the mailing list.

• touch --mode. Not deemed beneficial enough.
• du --format to allow sorting. sort -h handles this.
• cat --timestamp. awk or perl is good enough for this.
• ls --octal-perms. stat -c '%a' suffices.
• tac -z. tac -s $'\0' is equivalent.
• where am i. `hostname; pwd` is fine.

Additions

Note you can see the latest changes as they're added in the NEWS file (subscribe via RSS).

• join -o 'auto' to auto detect output format
• dd oflag=nocache to discard buffer cache
• cp and mv use fiemap to efficiently copy sparse files
• dd iflag=fullblock is suggested when appropriate
• df aligns columns regardless of locale or block size

TODO

These items mentioned in the last update are not done yet.

• Integrate fallocate(2) into cp and mv. The interface hasn't been improved, so we'll just use it as is
• posix_fallocate() is still not used due to its dependence on fallocate(2)
• libunistring is now available in debian and fedora and we're about to start using it in coreutils
• integrate Linus' faster sha1sum. Also the much faster SSE sha1sum implementation was mentioned, which although architecture specific, is probably worth including given the ubiquity of the architecture and the performance gain it provides
• support unlimited number of split files
• dd skip_bytes count_bytes to efficiently extract portions of a file
• speed up seq
• sort --range to more efficiently output a subset of the input
• add a NSA/DoD verify function to shred
• More sensible cp --preserve=mode behavior
• Handle ACLs by not using umask
• Add a status=noinfo option to silence dd
• Automatically use more CPU cache efficient buffer sizes in sort
• Possibly integrate the threaded external sort patch
• Add an inplace contrib/ script (or command) to robustly edit files in-place
• uniq --key (like sort --key)
• Add OCFS2 support to cp --reflink
• join should support sort options like -n
• split should have --suffix option
• dd oflag={fsync,BLKFLSBUF}
• cut --blank-separated

Also new items cropped up since the last update.

• split --filter to compress output etc.
• basename -a -s to act as a filter
• shuf --random-range=LO-HI to allow repetition within range
• uniq --group to enhance grouping
• csplit --suppress-matched to exclude delimiter lines from the output files
• support SEEK_DATA/SEEK_HOLE in ZFS to efficiently copy sparse files