The GNU project has announced the release of coreutils 9.8, a new stable version of the essential collection of basic file, shell, and text manipulation utilities found on nearly every Linux and Unix-like system.
This release introduces several notable features. The most striking change is that the cksum command now supports SHA3 hashing, providing options for SHA3-224, SHA3-256, SHA3-384, and SHA3-512. The basenc tool gains Base58 encoding and decoding, a format designed to avoid visually ambiguous characters.
Moreover, the fold command is now multi-byte character aware, ensuring proper handling of wide characters and providing a new --characters option. Meanwhile, nproc has been updated to respect Linux cgroup v2 CPU quotas, and stty can now set arbitrary baud rates on supported systems.
Alongside the new features, the update addresses a significant number of bugs. For example, cp --sparse=always and related commands now correctly create file holes in more cases, tail no longer outputs extra lines under certain conditions, and od has been fixed to avoid memory errors and mishandling of large widths.
Additionally, fundamental utilities like install, ls, and nohup also received corrections to address incorrect or confusing behavior.
Coreutils 9.8 also brings improved POSIX.1-2024 compliance. The realpath command now supports the -E option, readlink responds more consistently when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, and tsort now accepts and ignores the -w option.
On the performance side, the factor utility is faster at handling very large numbers, while seq has gained accuracy with large starting values.
Finally, tools such as cksum and wc can now disable hardware acceleration at runtime through the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable, offering more control over execution.
For more information, see the announcement.
