This is to announce coreutils-9.12, a stable release.
Notable changes include:
env supports a new --env0-from=FILE option to support
full persistence and restoration of the environment.
This also supports e.g. filtering like:
env -i --env0-from=<( env -0 | sed -z ... )
Commands now have safer terminal output,
avoiding confusing output or corrupted terminal state.
Commands that traverse directories no longer
fail merely if files are being removed in parallel.
ptx has improved robustness, avoiding potential infinite loops.
tee fixes robustness issues introduced in the previous release,
where it could go into an infinite loop or incorrectly error
in the presence of short writes.
stty is more accepting of variations in requested speed.
sort(1) will now better use available memory
and parallel operation when reading from pipes.
There have also been many bug fixes and other changes
as summarized in the NEWS below.
There have been 288 commits by 16 people in the 21 weeks since 9.11.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
Arun Bhattacharya (1) Leonid Evdokimov (1)
Ayesha Shafique (1) Mateusz Nosek (1)
Bruno Haible (5) Max Downey Twiss (1)
Collin Funk (98) Paul Eggert (12)
Guanqiang Han (1) Pádraig Brady (118)
H. Peter Anvin (1) Sylvestre Ledru (33)
Ismail Ramzi (1) aizu-m (2)
Iván Ezequiel Rodriguez (2) oech3 (11)
Pádraig [on behalf of the coreutils maintainers]
==================================================================
Here is the GNU coreutils home page:
https://gnu.org/s/coreutils/
Here are the compressed sources:
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.12.tar.gz (16MB)
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.12.tar.xz (6.4MB)
Here are the GPG detached signatures:
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.12.tar.gz.sig
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.12.tar.xz.sig
Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
Here are the SHA256 and SHA3-256 checksums:
SHA256 (coreutils-9.12.tar.gz) = FMv1pN4Me3+jufp/raTFiy3v4zM2qo/YPXYixcTr3BM=
SHA3-256 (coreutils-9.12.tar.gz) =
14aJyepDW60jsaL4cq5T/UFMwUJEkXDyUqZEQlsnLFM=
SHA256 (coreutils-9.12.tar.xz) = pIAZhVlzPps9qZnpBUOsb4iKLKpUTY1mTFofF+Uo4hA=
SHA3-256 (coreutils-9.12.tar.xz) =
cKcyD1sxJr1tdWgWbh0+OKwOEIpaf2ACThlaHZooZDA=
Verify the base64 SHA256 checksum with 'cksum -a sha256 --check'
from coreutils-9.2 or OpenBSD's cksum since 2007.
Verify the base64 SHA3-256 checksum with 'cksum -a sha3 --check'
from coreutils-9.8.
Use a .sig file 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-9.12.tar.gz.sig coreutils-9.12.tar.gz
The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:
pub rsa4096/0xDF6FD971306037D9 2011-09-23 [SC]
Key fingerprint = 6C37 DC12 121A 5006 BC1D B804 DF6F D971 3060 37D9
uid [ultimate] Pádraig Brady <[email protected]>
uid [ultimate] Pádraig Brady <[email protected]>
If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.
gpg --locate-external-key [email protected]
gpg --recv-keys DF6FD971306037D9
wget -q -O-
'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=coreutils&download=1'
| gpg --import -
As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
keyring:
wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
gpg --keyring gnu-keyring.gpg --verify coreutils-9.12.tar.gz.sig
coreutils-9.12.tar.gz
This release is based on the coreutils git repository, available as
git clone https://https.git.savannah.gnu.org/git/coreutils.git
with commit c0f8514d989184921d9b12a4d103a7b23abc5af8 tagged as v9.12.
For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
https://gitweb.git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v9.12
or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
git shortlog v9.11..v9.12
This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
Autoconf 2.73.16-0a513
Automake 1.18.1
Gnulib 2026-09-07 106e9b2384d08a1696fcbd40cbab52237943f208
Bison 3.8.2
NEWS
* Noteworthy changes in release 9.12 (2026-09-14) [stable]
** Bug fixes
'chcon', 'chgrp', 'chmod', 'chown', 'du', 'ls' which traverse hierarchies with
-R, no longer fail merely because files may be being removed in parallel.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
'comm - -' no longer closes standard input twice. Previously it would
mistakenly exit with a nonzero status.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
'cp', 'install', and 'mv' now fall back to a standard copy
if a --reflink=auto clone fails due to EDQUOT, ENOMEM, or ENOSPC.
E.g., with XFS, a clone can exhaust metadata space in an allocation
group, while a standard copy works.
[bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
'cut -d' with multiple multi-byte delimiter options specified
will correctly match the last delimiter specified.
[bug introduced with multi-byte support in coreutils-9.11]
'date -d '1-2-3' "+%_D"' no longer propagates flags like _ and - to the year
component of the %D date specifier, keeping consistent component formatting.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
'du --max-depth=N' now exits with a nonzero exit status and an error message
if N is negative. Previously it behaved as if N were zero.
[bug introduced in coreutils-9.4]
'factor' avoids a buffer over-read (CWE-126) for certain values.
[bug introduced in coreutils-9.8]
'head' and 'tail' now quote names in file headers when needed.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
'ls --color' no longer reads freed memory when LS_COLORS sets "ln=target"
and later becomes unparsable, e.g., LS_COLORS='ln=target:x'.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
'mv' now warns when copying extended attributes fails with ENOTSUP, e.g., when
moving files to a file system that does not support them.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
'numfmt', 'printf', and 'seq' on Solaris, no longer output an extraneous e+00
when using a large precision like "%.5119f".
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
'pinky -l' no longer no longer prints output in the incorrect order when
standard output is fully buffered, e.g., when redirected to a file.
[bug introduced in coreutils-9.10]
'pr' now exits gracefully upon exceeding internal accounting limits,
like when processing large tab stops.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
'ptx -G' no longer loops forever when the output width is smaller than
twice the gap size, as with 'ptx -G -w4', or when a long reference
leaves that little room, as with 'ptx -G -r'.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
'ptx -W' no longer loops forever with a word regular expression that can
match the empty string, like: echo ab | ptx -W 'a*'.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
'shred' no longer blocks when opening a FIFO that has no readers.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
'stty' no longer fails when the system uses speed encodings that
are variations of the requested speed.
[bug introduced in coreutils-9.8]
'tee' no longer loops infinitely after writing all output if a write call sets
errno to EAGAIN.
[bug introduced in coreutils-9.11]
'tee' no longer treats short writes as errors.
[bug introduced in coreutils-9.11]
'test' no longer treats '-a' and '-o' as operators when given as strings to a
binary operator. E.g., 'test -a -a -a' exits successfully instead of exiting
with an error.
[This bug was present in "the beginning".]
'truncate --reference=R' no longer hangs when R is a FIFO with no readers.
[bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
'unexpand -t' no longer overflows a heap buffer, for tab values > SIZE_MAX/16,
or with multi-byte blank characters longer than the tab value.
[bugs introduced in coreutils-9.11]
'uniq -w' no longer overruns the read buffer in multibyte locales.
[bug introduced in coreutils-9.5]
'wc' no longer reads past the end of a lookup table in legacy multibyte
locales like SHIFT-JIS where a single byte can decode to a wide character.
[bug introduced in coreutils-9.5]
Messages from Gnulib are no longer mistranslated in non-English locales.
[bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]
** New Features
'env' now supports --env0-from=FILE to read NUL-delimited environment entries
from a file. With -i, entries are preserved exactly, allowing full
round-tripping of environments containing duplicate or nonstandard entries.
'stat' and 'tail' now know about the "failfs" and "nullfs" file system types.
stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type,
and tail -f uses inotify for these file systems.
uname adds the -A,--all-labeled option to label all output, one item per line.
** Changes in behavior
'env' and 'printenv' now quote printed environment variables honoring the
QUOTING_STYLE environment variable, defaulting to shell-escape style. This
avoids printing arbitrary data to the terminal and allows the output to be
sourced by a POSIX shell.
'ls' -w,--width no longer includes '\n' in the width of a line.
I.e., the width or $COLUMNS is interpreted to be an _inclusive_ maximum.
'stat' now uses shell quoting when required, to more robustly escape
file names. Previously it only quoted file names with the %N format.
The default quoting honors the QUOTING_STYLE env variable (like %N).
Also %Qn is a newly supported format combination to quote file names,
leaving the existing %n format for when quoting is not desired.
** Improvements
When built with the configure option '--with-wtmpdb', invocations of
'who /var/log/wtmp' and 'users /var/log/wtmp' use the wtmpdb database
instead of the file /var/log/wtmp. This makes them Y2038-safe.
'cut -w' operates more efficiently when extracting the start of a line
in multi-byte locales, giving 4x more throughput with typical input.
'df', 'du', 'ls', 'od', 'pr', and 'sort' now escape invalid arguments in error
messages for options expecting an integer.
'env -0, and 'printenv -0' now explicitly set binary mode on output
so that no CRLF translation is done e.g., on windows.
'install -C' will now avoid updating file metadata when the destination
already has the appropriate ownership and permissions.
'basename', 'dirname', 'du', 'readlink', and 'realpath' now quote output in
shell-escape style when standard output is a terminal. The QUOTING_STYLE
environment variable can be used to adjust or disable the quoting.
'ls -m' now quotes files names containing commas when appropriate,
so users can better distinguish separating commas.
'ls' now replaces newlines in file names if ambiguous with separators.
Previously newlines were protected only when outputting to a terminal.
'sort' will now better use available memory and parallel operation
when reading from unknown sized inputs like pipes.
'uniq -c' now operates up to 2.5x times faster on systems with unlocked stdio
functions.
** Build-related
'logname' now builds, where getlogin() is replaced (e.g. with musl),
and systemd libs are being used, by linking the required libraries.
The multi-call binary built with configure --enable-single-binary is reduced
in size by around 10KB through the more efficient reuse of the 'test' code
by '[', and the 'true' code by 'false'.
configure no longer accepts the --with-linux-crypto option, which allowed
cksum, md5sum, and sha*sum to use the Linux AF_ALG API. This API will be
deprecated in Linux 7.2 and is less performant than OpenSSL.
The configure option '--enable-systemd' is renamed to '--with-systemd'.
The option '--enable-systemd' was a misnomer and is now deprecated.
The 'sort' binary now uses the UAPI Group's .note.dlopen ELF note
to indicate its dependency on libcrypto.
-
Also posted at https://savannah.gnu.org/news/?id=10932
