This is the new release declared "stable" by upstream devs after "beta" 7.0 release we left out. I've added info file handling taking care of a possible missing texinfo not sure if it is needed. All patches have been updated to the latest Fedora/Gentoo versions. The formerly preset POSIX behavior should be obsolete now. "tail -x" works well here. Maybe you know for what case it was added in the past. Please do some tests and give me signoffs. -Andy * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable] ** New features Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2 and XFS. cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified mv: Always tries to copy xattrs install: Never copies xattrs cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain from overwriting any existing destination file dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O) mode where this feature is available. install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then do not modify the destination at all. ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type ** Bug fixes chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1] cp uses much less memory in some situations cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90), doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before processing the first file name seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers on systems with extended long double support and good library support. Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output, from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11] seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number to correctly print all numbers to the same width. wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known to be small enough. ** Changes in behavior cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed. Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years. dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better. Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors. du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25. ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.', rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL is still marked with a '+'. * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta] ** New programs timeout: Run a command with bounded time. truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size. ** New features chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance, even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order. Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement from the newer version of fts in gnulib. comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can be turned off with the --nocheck-order option. comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB. cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented. dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks. With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read, until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error. df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all arguments after all arguments have been processed. If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is used to factor large numbers. install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to strip binaries. ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp) md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too. sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with maximum command-line (argv) length. sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once. When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files. sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version), specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp. ** Bug fixes chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles. seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",". Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example. shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation previously claimed it was called --head-lines. ** Improvements Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10, HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs. join has significantly better performance due to better memory management ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format, no matter how many files are in a given directory od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from padding the input out to the least common multiple width. ** Changes in behavior stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op. Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.