This status update (subscribe via RSS) comes about 4 months after the last one, and coincides with release 8.15. Note also the bug tracker with stats 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.

• split --balanced to balance lines across the last two buckets. split -nl/$num supports this better.
• touch --only-create. There are other ways to achieve the same functionality.
• uniq --unsorted. This would add a lot of complexity that's already contained within sort.
• tableize. This new command was tought better done as a --border option to column -t.
• rmdir -r. rm -r was deemed sufficient.
• shred -r. shred is of limited use with files anyway.
• *sum --ignore-dirs. The use cases were seen as too limited.
• uniq --ignore-last-fields. `rev | uniq -f | rev` was deemed sufficient.

Additions

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

• *sum --check now support "-r" format from the corresponding BSD tool.
• date supports "hence" in date strings (as an opposite to "ago").
• date --iso-8601 is again documented, as the "T" separator is supported since v8.13.
• realpath. A new program to print resolved paths.
• df avoids UUID-named file systems. Newer kernels report these over wide names.

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 though the benefits are arch and compiler specific. 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
• 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 and elsewhere to efficiently copy sparse files
• Add a `chid` tool to easily drop privileges
• chmod --parents to update permission on a full path
• wc -b -M to output frequencies of characters
• PAM support for su
• multiarch support in stdbuf
• rename might be a candidate for coreutils
• split --numeric-suffixes=1 to make starting number configurable
• --noatime support to various recursive traversal tools
• increase IO block size from 32 to 64K. cat, cp etc may benefit from this
• dd conv=sparse like FreeBSD to generate file with holes
• printf %{human} to abbreviate numbers to 5M 4G etc.

Also new items cropped up since the last update.

• rm --no-traverse-mount-points which would be especially useful with bind mounts
• du --size to filter results to above/below a specified size
• stat(1) and ls(1) support for birth time. Dependent on xstat() being provided by the kernel
• fmt -w should not have such low limits
• group -0 to support group names with spaces etc.
• cp -u should be restartable. Currently may leave partial files in dest, or wrong files in the presence of hard links.
• chmod -hHLP should be supported (like BSD).