GNU Coreutils 9.12 has been released as the latest stable version of the essential collection of command-line utilities used on most Linux and Unix-like systems.
One main addition is a new --env0-from=FILE option for the env command, allowing environment data to be saved and restored more reliably, including less common or nonstandard entries.
There are notable speed improvements as well. The cut command can now be up to four times faster in certain multibyte text-processing workloads, while uniq -c can run up to 2.5 times faster on supported systems.
Moreover, sort has been improved to better use available memory and parallel processing when handling data from pipes or other sources where the total input size is unknown.
Another new feature comes to uname, which now offers a new --all-labeled option for displaying system information in a clearer, labeled format, with each value shown on a separate line.
Coreutils 9.12 also improves how several commands display unusual file names and environment values in the terminal. Tools including env, printenv, stat, basename, dirname, du, readlink, and realpath now use safer quoting in more situations, helping avoid confusing or broken terminal output.
Several commonly used recursive commands have become more robust. chmod, chown, du, ls, and others will no longer fail because files are deleted while a directory tree is processed.
For file operations, cp, install, and mv can now fall back to a normal copy in more cases when an attempted reflink copy isn’t possible, instead of failing.
Among the more visible fixes, tee no longer risks getting stuck in an infinite loop under certain write conditions, while ptx also fixes two cases that could previously cause the command to loop indefinitely.
Other fixes cover commands including comm, date, du, factor, head, tail, ls, mv, printf, seq, shred, stty, truncate, uniq, and wc.
Lastly, on the build side, the old --with-linux-crypto option has been removed, while the --enable-systemd option has been renamed to --with-systemd.
For additional details, see the announcement.
