Coreutils

Introduction

The GNU Core Utilities are the basic file, shell and text manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system. These are the core utilities which are expected to exist on every operating system.

Previously these utilities were offered as three individual sets of GNU utilities, fileutils, shellutils, and textutils. Those three have been combined into a single set of utilities called the coreutils.

Documentation

The manual is available in the info system of the GNU Operating System. Use info to access the top level info page. Use info coreutils to access the Core Utilities section directly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Please check the FAQ for the core utilities for answers to your most frequently asked questions. This FAQ contains answers to questions asked on the mailing lists and newsgroups. FAQs are by definition asked frequently and these questions will be asked again regardless of the existence of an FAQ. However, it does make answering questions easier as a more complete answer can be provided here than on the public forums.

Downloading

Released versions of GNU coreutils can be found in the subdirectory /gnu/coreutils/ on your favorite GNU mirror. For other ways to obtain coreutils, please read How to get GNU Software. The latest released version will be the latest version available at http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/coreutils/.

Testing versions of alpha releases can be found on the alpha release server. A different server is used for alpha releases so that people do not confuse testing snapshots and released versions. Alpha test versions are available at ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/. The latest development sources can be obtained through CVS from Savannah.

How to Get Help

For general discussion of coreutils and for reporting bugs the mailing list bug-coreutils@gnu.org is the most appropriate forum. Please do not send messages encoded as HTML nor encoded as base64 MIME nor included as multiple formats. Please send messages as plain text. Please include a descriptive subject line. If all of the subjects are bug then it is impossible to differentiate them. Please avoid sending large messages, such as log files, system call trace output, and other content resulting in messages over about 40kb, to the mailing lists without prior contact. Those are best sent directly to those requesting that information after initial contact. Before reporting bugs please read the FAQ.

It has been necessary to moderate the mailing list to prevent the flood of spam. Postings to the list are held for release by the list moderator. Sometimes the moderators are unavailable for brief periods of time. Please be patient when posting there. If you don't see the message in the list archive then it did not get posted.

You may subscribe to the mailing list at http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils. An archive of the bug report mailing list is available at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/. Since coreutils had existed as the three individual packages for a long time you may want to read the archives of those previous mailing lists. An archive of the previous bug report mailing lists are available at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fileutils/ and at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-sh-utils/and at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-textutils/.

How to Help

To contact the maintainers, either to report a bug or to contribute fixes or improvements, send mail to bug-coreutils@gnu.org. If posting patches they should be in unified diff format against the latest alpha testing version or preferably against the latest CVS development source code. They should include a text description of the change and the unified diff inline in the message and not attached to it. See the numerous postings by the maintainers for examples of the preferred format.

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Updated: $Date: 2006/11/20 10:00:50 $ $Author: ramprasadb $