How the latest coreutils leveraged terminal hyperlinks to directly link to the full online documentation

Phoronix didn't link the full NEWS: https://savannah.gnu.org/news/?id=10816

Some extra notes...

Accurate (cgroup aware) nproc is important, as detailed in: https://danluu.com/cgroup-throttling/

The new base58 encoding performs well being around 500 times faster than arbitrary int implementation internal to cpython 3.13 for example

GNU coreutils can be built as a single binary with ./configure --enable-single-binary. One can install this variant on Fedora for example with the coreutils-single package, and this is used in some container images.

FWIW GNU coreutils' shuf uses reservoir sampling for larger inputs to give bounded memory operation

42/2

When I replied, the article had been posted 42 minutes ago and had 42 upvotes.

That can’t be a coincidence.

The people running our simulation are just fucking with us at this point.

For similar functionality have a look at crudini, which is a utility designed for interacting with ini files from shell scripts:

https://github.com/pixelb/crudini

Nice article. See also: https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/stdio_buffering/

It's also worth mentioning a recent improvement we made (in coreutils 8.28) to the operation of the `tail | grep` example in the article. tail now notices if the pipe goes away, so one could wait for something to appear in a log, like:

    tail -f /log/file | grep -q match
    then_do_something

There are lots of gotchas to pipe handling really. See also: https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/sigpipe_handling.html

You might find my "symlinks, hardlinks and reflinks explained" article useful: https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/unix_links.html

The vi vs emacs thing permeates a lot of tools. I find it useful to map all tools to be consistent with one or the other. Personally I use vi. Unfortunately setting vi mode for readline has a few caveats, but I was able to work around all of them with the settings in:

https://www.pixelbeat.org/settings/.inputrc

One might be wondering why 'test' and '[' are separate binaries at all. This is to give maximum flexibility wrt copying binaries etc. Note one can build coreutils like busybox as a single binary, by just `./configure --enable-single-binary` at build time. This is already available as an option on Fedora at least through the coreutils-single (1.2MB) package.