GNU file utilities 1.1 released
David J. MacKenzie
anonymous ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu (18.71.0.38) in the file
pub/gnu/fileutils-1.1.tar.Z. Because of the large number of changes
from release 1.0, no diffs file is being distributed.
The programs this package contains are:
cat chmod cmp cp create dd dir du head ln ls mkdir mkfifo mv rm rmdir tail vdir
dir and vdir are ls with different default output formats.
create and mkfifo are POSIX inventions.
Here is the README from the distribution:
This is the GNU file manipulation utilities package. Most of these
programs have significant advantages over their Unix counterparts,
such as greater speed or additional flexibility. Changes from release
1.0 include some bug fixes, enhancements, and changes for POSIX
conformance, including the addition of two programs invented by the
POSIX committee.
The fileutils are intended to be POSIX compliant, like the rest of the
GNU system. They are not all quite there yet; however, the POSIX
shell and utilities standard (1003.2) has not been finalized, either.
They presently don't support internationalization features, since none
of the C libraries that I have access to do. (The GNU C library isn't
finished.)
The documentation for these programs is not finished yet, and needs to
be rewritten. However, most of them accept descriptive long-named
options in addition to Unix-style short-named options, which should
help you figure out their additional features. Giving a `-h' option
(or any invalid option) will produce a usage message. Some of the
programs also have explanatory comments at the top of the source code.
The GNU tail command has no -r option (print backwards). Printing the
entire file, as the Unix manual says, could run out of memory when
tailing a pipe unless the contents of the pipe are stored in a
temporary file. Reversing a file is really a different job from
printing the end of a file; the BSD tail can get away with kludging it
in because of its limited size buffer. A more versatile way than tail
-r to reverse files is the `tac' command which comes in the 4.3BSD
user-contributed code distribution. An enhanced GNU version of `tac'
might be included in a future distribution of the fileutils.
Suggestions and bug reports for these programs should be mailed to
bug-gn...@prep.ai.mit.edu.
David MacKenzie <d...@ai.mit.edu> <d...@eng.umd.edu>