coreutils inbox - Dec 2009

This status update comes about 4 months after the last one and coincides with the release of coreutils 8.2. As always you can see the latest changes as they're added in the NEWS file, and you can also subscribe to see those changes.

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.

cp,mv --to. Though better than --target it wasn't warranted to have two ways to do it
mv --parents x/dir1 /y/dir2 /destination. There was little interest in this
unicode symbols for cp,mv --verbose. Rejected for same reasons as UTF-8 arrows in ls output
cut -d '[:blank:]'. The exisiting tr -s '[:blank:]' ' ' | cut -d ' ' was deemed sufficient. Note
sleep --random. The existing tools to achieve this were deemed sufficient
md5sum --threads. The UNIX toolkit already handles processing files in parallel
cp,mv --progress. Existing tools cater for this already
Auto detect output format for join. We need to consider further whether this is useful
--at options for commands. This functionality was not deemed required for shell
md5sum --base32. There was little interest in this Internet Archive specific functionality
quoted-printable. recode or perl can easily decode this format
df,du -g. Specifying "Gigabyte" output format is neither standard or required
remove chown,cpio user: shortcut. This was deemed useful and so retained
Add a sparse command. cp already supports creating sparse files
Add a getlimits command. This would not be standard enough outside of a particular project
distinguished symbols for cp,mv --verbose. It was deemed there was enough info from the context
I/O throughput limitation for dd. pv and rsync et. al. were deemed better for this

Additions

The last few months has mainly been stabilization work, but there have been a few new features:

cp --reflink got the "auto" parameter to fallback to a standard copy if CoW is not available
rm was rewritten to use fts for directory traversal
ln got the -L and -P options which hardlink targets and the symlink themselves respectively
touch got the -h option to operate on symlinks rather than their targets
env,printenv got the -0 option to delimit entries with NUL
echo,printf now interpret \e as the escape char (\x1b) like gcc, perl, bash, ...
A new nproc program was added to print the number of available processors

TODO

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

fallocate(2) was not integrated into cp and mv. The interface hasn't changed, 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 coretuils.
Add sort --key-debug to help figure out the complicated key selection rules in sort
Integrate Linus' faster sha1sum
cp --attributes-only

Also new items cropped up since the last update.