The coreutils tag has no wiki summary.
3
votes
3answers
81 views
How can I display octal notation of permissions with ls - and can octal represent all permissions? [duplicate]
After looking at the man page for ls on my system and searching Google, I see there IS a hack of way to use awk or perl to show octal permissions when using ls, but with bash is there anything more ...
4
votes
1answer
54 views
How does coreutil's date manage to get such weird results?
I was playing around with date to try to convert expressions such as "2 hours" to a number of seconds like 7200. I thought I could perform this with invocations such as:
date -d "1970-01-01 00:00:00 ...
3
votes
1answer
43 views
tac command's option creates strange output [comprehension question]
Say I have this file, containing nothing than
a
b
c
b
a
Using tac --separator=a file in BASH [on a Debian based Linux], I get this:
# empty line
# empty line
b
...
6
votes
1answer
42 views
Is there a way to express: `--link` or fall back to ordinary copy in cp (from GNU coreutils)?
Is there a way to tell cp to --link (i.e. create hard links), but fall back in the case where I am attempting inter-device hardlinks? Inter-device links aren't possible and would cause cp to fail.
...
3
votes
4answers
391 views
Make cp return an error value if the target exists
Is there a way to make cp (from GNU coreutils on Linux) return a nonzero value in case the target file does already exist?
Or is there any other small utility which is commonly available and which ...
2
votes
1answer
140 views
Install only a few GNU coreutils?
Is there a way to build and install only a few of the GNU coreutils?
The README in coreutils-8.19.tar.xz lists 100-odd, but the INSTALL doesn't say how to install only a few, and the Makefile is (to ...
3
votes
4answers
233 views
Is there a practical use for the GNU factor command?
Looking through the GNU Coreutils, I spotted the factor command, that I had never noticed before.
Reading the man page:
Print the prime factors of each specified integer NUMBER. If none
are ...
2
votes
3answers
133 views
When the lines of a file or directory get too long, upgrade to ls list format?
Is there a way I can do this? For example if a gets a long name like:
i-have-names-that-are-too-long-to-describe/
i-have-names-that-are-too-long-to-describe-2/
...
8
votes
2answers
355 views
What is the point of ls -f (or, why is this hanging?)
I've got a directory with about 100,000 files in it. ls -f hangs for over a minute. I ran strace, and immediately started seeing getdents, so ls is clearly reading the directory. I also see a lot ...
3
votes
2answers
625 views
Trailing slashes on symbolic links to directories
I'm trying to emulate the process of path resolution (see man page path_resolution) in unix-like systems.
My OS is Linux with GNU coreutils 8.7.
In order to clarify the meaning of extra trailing '/' ...
11
votes
2answers
217 views
`test` and `[` - different binaries, any difference?
I noticed while answering another question that test and [ are different binaries, but the [ manpage pulls up test's. Besides the requirement for an ending ], is there any difference? If not, why are ...
2
votes
1answer
204 views
Why does unlink(1) support only one file?
I'm used to commands supporting multiple filename arguments if possible, but unlink doesn't:
%> unlink a b
unlink: extra operand `b'
Try `unlink --help' for more information.
I ended up using a ...
20
votes
6answers
6k views
Correct locking in shell scripts?
Sometimes you have to make sure that only one instance of a shell script is running at the same time.
For example a cron job which is executed via crond that does not provide
locking on its own (e.g. ...
3
votes
2answers
751 views
GNU “install” -d flag — how's it work?
I'm trying to write a makefile rule to copy a directory, maintaining its structure, and since all the other rules in our makefiles use install, I wanted to be consistent.
In the manpage, it says:
...
9
votes
2answers
512 views
What languages are used to build Unix commands?
Examples of commands I'm referring to are ls, pwd, and cd. Also, how are these built? Do you have an example?
7
votes
2answers
516 views
coreutils that are utf aware?
When I used cut today, I found out it doesn't treat a utf-8 character as a character, but 3 characters because it's 3 bytes long.
This seems to be generally true for many tools.
Are there versions ...
4
votes
2answers
203 views
Which version of X introduced feature Y?
A big part of my daily job is developing software for use on machines with different versions of the same software, like bash, find, and grep. When encountering a feature which would be useful for ...
5
votes
4answers
2k views
Any options to replace GNU coreutils on Linux?
I've been thinking about discontinuing the use of GNU Coreutils on my Linux systems, but to be honest, unlike many other GNU components, I can't think of any alternatives (on Linux). What alternatives ...
5
votes
3answers
2k views
Storing output of command in shell variable
I have an operation using cut that I would like to assign result to a variable
var4=ztemp.xml |cut -f1 -d '.'
I get the error:
ztemp.xml is not a command
The value of var4 never gets ...
4
votes
1answer
395 views
Is gnu coreutils sort broken?
Consider the following input to sort:
cat > foo <<EOM
D,,5014978
DD,,25
D,I,1972765530
D,Y,4223624
-,Y,71285059
YA,I,2
EOM
Now try running sort foo
The output is not sorted when trying ...
2
votes
1answer
206 views
Has the GNU coreutils stat tool changed?
Has the GNU coreutils (8.6) version of stat changed? After a recent update, some scripts I wrote that call stat are not working as expected; in particular, I had been making use of stat -c %Y ...
