Coreutils-5.2.1

The Coreutils package contains utilities for showing and setting the basic system characteristics.

Approximate build time:  0.9 SBU
Required disk space:     69 MB

Coreutils installation depends on: Bash, Binutils, Coreutils, Diffutils, GCC, Gettext, Glibc, Grep, Make, Perl, Sed.

Installation of Coreutils

Prepare Coreutils for compilation:

DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209 ./configure --prefix=/tools

This package has an issue when compiled against versions of glibc later than 2.3.2. Some of the Coreutils utilities (such as head, tail and sort) will reject their traditional syntax, a syntax that has been in use for approximately 30 years. This old syntax is so pervasive that compatibility should be preserved until the many places where it is used can be updated. Backwards compatibility is achieved by setting the DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION environment variable to "199209" in the above command. If you don't want coreutils to be backwards compatible with the traditional syntax, then simply omit setting the DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION environment variable. Realise though, that doing so will mean you'll have to deal with the consequences yourself: patch the many packages that still use the old syntax. We therefore recommend using the instructions exactly as given above.

Compile the package:

make

(If you insist on testing the results, then issue: make RUN_EXPENSIVE_TESTS=yes check. The RUN_EXPENSIVE_TESTS=yes parameter tells the test suite to run several additional tests that are considered relatively expensive on some platforms but generally are not a problem on Linux.)

And install the package:

make install

The details on this package are found in the section called “Contents of Coreutils”.