coreutils-7.3 released [stable]

[Jim Meyering]

This is to announce coreutils-7.3, a "stable" release.
It is mainly to fix the sort -m -o regression, but there have
been a few other interesting fixes and improvements.

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v7.3
or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git shortlog v7.2..v7.3

To summarize the gnulib-related changes, run these commands from a
git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git checkout v7.3
  git summary v7.2

Here are the compressed sources:
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-7.3.tar.gz   (9.3MB)
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-7.3.tar.xz   (3.9MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-7.3.tar.gz.sig
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-7.3.tar.xz.sig

[*] You can use either of the above signature files to verify that
the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact.  First,
be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball.
Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify coreutils-7.3.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys B9AB9A16

and rerun the `gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.63b.41-3bec0
  Automake 1.10c
  Gnulib v0.0-2101-g278d609
  Bison 2.4

NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
  --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
  Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
  when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.

  ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
  names from the locale database that have differing widths.

  ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly

  mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
  systems without xattr support.

  sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
  E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
  [introduced in coreutils-7.2]

** Changes in behavior

  shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
  This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
  default should proceed at the speed of the disk.  Previously /dev/urandom
  was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.

** Improved robustness

  cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
  of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
  destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
  Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
  a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
  allows this).  This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
  syscalls when copying small files.  Affected linux kernels: at least
  2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
  [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]

** Portability

  df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
  which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting.  Now, df uses open.

  `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
  would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
  due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
  [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
  [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]

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