This status update comes about 4 months after the last one. As always you can see the latest changes as they're added in the NEWS file (changes via RSS). There is also a bug tracker available to record 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.

• fold --indent. `fmt -t | sed 's/^ / /'` was deemed sufficient
• hostname -b. Setting a default hostname is too platform dependent
• truncate -s +50%. Percentage calculation was thought best handled outside of truncate
• cut --csv. A separate util was deemed best for this complicated task
• mktemp -tp. It was thought better to create a fifo in a temp dir, rather than a temp fifo directly
• rm -d. rmdir is equivalent and less confusing
• date -iso8601. date --rfc-3339 was deemed sufficient
• uniq -c --total. piping to awk '{t+=$1}END{print t,"total"}1' was deemed sufficient

Additions

• cp --attributes-only was added to only copy file metadata
• ls uses the narrower traditional time/date style by default, which includes the locale's abbreviated month name
• sort -g uses long doubles rather than just doubles for greater range and precision and similar performance
• sort --debug was added to warn about questionable options and highlight key extents
• sort uses all available processors by default, which can be limited with --parallel, `taskset` or OMP_NUM_THREADS
• sort supports more options in combination with -R and -V. -R is now allowed with -dfiV, and -V with -di
• stat supports %m to output the mount point. Similar to that output by df, but also handling bind mounts
• truncate supports setting a file's size relative to an existing file
• POSIX_FADV_SEQUENTIAL hint was provided to appropriate utils

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
• split --number is mostly ready for inclusion with the interface fully defined
• 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
• Fix column alignment in df (and pinky and stat)
• 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)
• Use fiemap for mv and cp to efficiently copy sparse files
• Add OCFS2 support to cp --reflink

Also new items cropped up since the last update.

• join should support sort options like -n
• split should have --suffix option
• mark some tests as for local file system only