1.16. coreutils

When a directory contained a symbolic link to itself, the readlink command incorrectly gave the following error message:

Too many levels of symbolic links.

With this update, the readlink command is able to correctly resolve values of recursive symbolic links to directories and no error messages are given.

When values of LC_TIME and LC_CTYPE variables differed, the sort utility sometimes terminated due to an assertion failure. This bug has been fixed and the sort utility no longer crashes in the described scenario.

When a child process was terminated by a signal, the su utility returned the wrong exit code of 0, which means exit success. With this update, the su utility always returns the correct exit code in the described scenario.

Previously, when the dd utility read data from a pipe and received a signal such as SIGPIPE, it stopped reading the current block and started with the new one immediately. This caused random output values when the dd utility was used to measure the size of an input file. With this update, the new iflag=fullblock option is available. When the option is used, the dd utility always continues to read incomplete blocks after receiving a signal.

On certain file systems such as VxFS, the Veritas File System, the rmdir() system call returned the wrong error code for non-empty directories. This caused the rmdir utility to fail to ignore the error when the --ignore-fail-on-non-empty command line option was specified. This bug has been fixed and the rmdir utility now handles errors on non-empty directories on VxFS partitions properly.

Previously, when the ls -1U command was called with two or more arguments and with at least one non-empty directory as an argument, directory entry names were printed before the name of their parent directories. This bug has been fixed and now the entries are printed in correct order.

Previously, the cp, mv and install utilities were unable to preserve extended attributes on files with read-only permissions. This bug has been fixed and the extended attributes are now preserved correctly by those utilities.

If the --ghost option was enabled for an automount point, the du command failed on an automounted directory if it was not mounted yet. This bug has been fixed and the du command now succeeds on an automounted directory on the first attempt.

Due to a regression, running the df -l command with a specific device specified resulted in a Permission denied error message for regular users. This bug has been fixed and specifying a device now works for regular users.

Because of internal reordering of arguments, the runcon utility was not able to handle execution of commands with arguments without the option separator --. With this update, the runcon utility no longer reorders arguments and this bug no longer occurs.

Previously, the --backup option of the mv command did not work with directories and the cannot move [directory] to a subdirectory of itself error message was returned. This bug has been fixed and the --backup option now works with directories as expected.

Previously, the runuser utility man page contained incorrect information about PAM API calls. With this update, the documentation has been amended.

Previously, certain scripts parsing the LS_COLORS environment variable used insufficient escaping, resulting in slow shell start-up in directories with too many files. This bug has been fixed and the shell start-up time is now more independent of the current directory.

When moving a directory into another non-empty directory, the mv utility returned a confusing cannot move [directory] to a subdirectory of itself error message. This bug has been fixed and the correct Directory not empty error message is now returned instead.

Previously, due to a bug in the su utility, the suspend command did not work for root users in tcsh shell. With this update, when the suspend command is called in a root shell, the Suspended (signal) message is returned and the user is put back into their user shell.

This update improves the coreutils documentation in the following ways: descriptions of the runcon and chcon utilities have been added; the behavior of newly added groups is now described; and the description of the mkdir --mode command has been extended.

Previously, deletion of a large number of files via the rm utility was taking too much time. With this update, the code has been optimized and the deletion is now faster.

With this update, many unnecessary warning messages of attempts for preserving ACLs on file systems without the support for ACLs have been suppressed, unless the preservation of ACLs is explicitly requested.

With this update, the -L (logical) and -P (physical) command line options are now supported. These options are used for resolving the path of current working directory.