These are the GNU file management utilities. Most of these programs have significant advantages over their Unix counterparts, such as greater speed, additional options, and fewer arbitrary limits. The programs that can be built with this package are: chgrp, chown, chmod, cp, dd, df, du, install, ln, dir, vdir, ls, mkdir, mvdir, mkfifo, mknod, mv, rm, rmdir, sync and touch. But mvdir is built only on systems that lack the rename system call. The programs cat, cut, expand, head, paste, split, tac, tail and unexpand, which used to be part of the fileutils, are now part of the textutils. cmp is now part of the diff distribution. See the file NEWS for a list of major changes in the current release. See the file INSTALL for compilation and installation instructions. If you are using a version of the Linux libc that predates 4.4.1, you should get a newer version. The old libraries contain getopt functions that are incompatible with several of these utilities. For instance, when built with the obsolete getopt functions, `chmod +x' will give usage errors instead of the expected results. The fileutils are intended to be POSIX.2 compliant (with BSD and other extensions), like the rest of the GNU system. They are almost there, but a few incompatibilities remain. The skeletal man pages that were provided with earlier versions of this package have been converted to Texinfo documentation. Although the Texinfo documentation is improved and much better organized (thanks to Karl Berry and Franc,ois Pinard) it is still not up to the standard of other GNU manuals. Although the man pages are still being distributed and installed, they are no longer being updated. The ls, dir, and vdir commands are all separate executables instead of one program that checks argv[0] because people often rename these programs to things like gls, gnuls, l, etc. Renaming a program file shouldn't affect how it operates, so that people can get the behavior they want with whatever name they want. On (old?) Sequents, the GNU install and chgrp utilities work only when run as root, because the Sequent chown system call doesn't allow non-root users to change files' groups, unlike on every other known Unix. (The Sequent /bin/chgrp is setuid root. Don't try making GNU chgrp setuid root unless you add security checks to it.) A warning about du for HP-UX users: GNU du (and I'm sure BSD-derived versions) counts the st_blocks field of the `struct stat' for each file. (It's best to use st_blocks where available, instead of st_size, because otherwise you get wildly wrong answers for sparse files like coredumps, and it counts indirect blocks.) Chris Torek in a comp.unix.wizards posting stated that in 4BSD st_blocks is always counted in 512 byte blocks. On HP-UX filesystems, however, st_blocks is counted in 1024 byte blocks. When GNU du is compiled on HP-UX, it assumes that st_blocks counts 1024-byte blocks, because locally mounted filesystems do; so to get the number of 512-byte blocks, it doubles the st_blocks value. (The HP-UX du seems to do the same thing.) This gives the correct numbers on HP-UX filesystems. But for 4BSD filesystems mounted on HP-UX machines, it gives twice the correct numbers; similarly, for HP-UX filesystems, du on 4BSD machines gives half the correct numbers. GNU ls with the -s option has the same problem. I know of no way to determine for a given filesystem or file what units st_blocks is measured in. The f_bsize element of `struct statfs' does not work, because its meaning varies between different versions of Unix. The GNU cp, mv, and ln commands can make backups of files that they are about to overwrite or remove. Backup file names will end up being the same as the original file names for files that are at the system's filename length limit; when that happens, the new file will silently replace the backup file that was just made. This happens with GNU Emacs, also. I am not aware of a clean, portable solution to this problem. Special thanks to Jim Meyering, Brian Matthews, Bruce Evans, Karl Berry, Kaveh Ghazi, and Franc,ois Pinard for help with debugging and porting these programs. Many thanks to all of the people who have taken the time to submit problem reports and fixes. Contributed changes are attributed in the ChangeLog file. Note that the distributed man pages are no longer being updated. The authoritative documentation is in texinfo form in the doc directory. INSTALLATION NOTE: On some systems (at least HPUX (9.xx?), Interactive (ISC) 4.1a, and probably other SVR3-based systems) `make install' fails because the running `install' program cannot be unlinked. If you experience that problem, you can work around it by rerunning configure and telling it to use the install-sh script to install files. If you use a Bourne-compatible shell, type this: INSTALL="`pwd`/install-sh -c" ./configure or if you have the env program type env INSTALL="`pwd`/install-sh -c" ./configure These programs all recognize the `--version' option. When reporting bugs, please include in the subject line both the package name/version and the name of the program for which you found a problem. For general documentation on the coding and usage standards this distribution follows, see the GNU standards document ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/standards.*, especially the `Makefile Conventions', `Configuration', and `User Interfaces' sections. Mail suggestions and bug reports for these programs to fileutils-bugs@gnu.ai.mit.edu.
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.
