Linux Cubed Series 3: Developer Tools/Linux Cubed Series 3 - Developer Tools.iso/utils/file/fileutil.13/fileutil/fileutils-3.13/README

Text File | 1996-04-20 | 5.3 KB | 107 lines

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.  Beginning with 3.10, the man pages will still be
distributed and installed, but they will no longer be 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 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:
If you're building on an HPUX (9.xx?) system and `make install' fails
because the running `install' program cannot be replaced, you need to
rerun configure, telling it to use the install-sh script to install
files (using a Bourne-compatible shell):

  INSTALL="`pwd`/install-sh -c" ./configure

or if you have the env program

  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 on
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
[e-mail].