These are the GNU file management utilities.  Most of these programs
have significant advantages over their Unix counterparts, such as
greater speed, additional options, and fewer arbitrary limits.

The programs that can be built with this package are: chgrp, chmod,
chown, cp, dd, df, dir, dircolors, du, install, ln, ls, mkdir, mkfifo,
mknod, mv, rm, rmdir, shred, sync, touch, and vdir.

See the file NEWS for a list of major changes in the current release.

See the file INSTALL for compilation and installation instructions.

The fileutils are intended to be POSIX.2 compliant (with BSD and other
extensions), like the rest of the GNU system.  They are almost there,
but a few incompatibilities remain.

The ls, dir, and vdir commands are all separate executables instead of
one program that checks argv[0] because people often rename these
programs to things like gls, gnuls, l, etc.  Renaming a program
file shouldn't affect how it operates, so that people can get the
behavior they want with whatever name they want.

Special thanks to Paul Eggert, Brian Matthews, Bruce Evans, Karl Berry,
Kaveh Ghazi, and François Pinard for help with debugging and porting
these programs.  Many thanks to all of the people who have taken the
time to submit problem reports and fixes.  All contributed changes are
attributed in the ChangeLog file.

And thanks to the following people who have provided accounts for
portability testing on many different types of systems: Bob Proulx,
Christian Robert, François Pinard, Greg McGary, Harlan Stenn,
Joel N. Weber, Mark D. Roth, Matt Schalit, Nelson H. F. Beebe,
Réjean Payette, Sam Tardieu.

Thanks to Michael Stone for inflicting test releases on Debian's
unstable distribution, and to all the kind folks who used that
distribution and found and reported bugs.

Note that each man page is now automatically generated from a template
and from the corresponding --help usage message.  Patches to the template
files (man/*.x) are welcome.  However, the authoritative documentation
is in texinfo form in the doc directory.

If you run the tests on a SunOS4.1.4 system, expect the ctime-part of
the ls `time-1' test to fail.  I believe that is due to a bug in the
way Sun implemented link(2) and chmod(2).

There are pretty many tests, but nowhere near as many as we need.
Additions and corrections are very welcome.

If you see a problem that you've already reported, feel free to
re-report it -- it won't bother me to get a reminder.  Besides, the
more messages I get regarding a particular problem the sooner it'll
be fixed -- usually.  If you sent a complete patch and I didn't apply
it or get back to you, please let me know.

WARNING:  If you modify files like configure.in, m4/*.m4, aclocal.m4,
or any Makefile.am, then don't be surprised if what gets regenerated no
longer works.  To make things work, you'll have to be using appropriate
versions of automake and autoconf.

As for what versions are `appropriate', I regret that I have been unable
to use unmodified versions of autoconf and automake in generating
build/configure-related files.  For automake, I used the development
sources (from cvs) as of 2001-03-11.  For autoconf, I used autoconf-2.49e
with the two patches described in recent fileutils ChangeLog entries.
Note however, that in principle at least, the next release of each of
those packages should work well.

These programs all recognize the `--version' option.  When reporting
bugs, please include in the subject line both the package name/version
and the name of the program for which you found a problem.

For general documentation on the coding and usage standards
this distribution follows, see the GNU Coding Standards,
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html.

Mail suggestions and bug reports for these programs to
bug-fileutils@gnu.org