These are the GNU text file (actually, file contents) processing
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: cat, cksum, comm,
csplit, cut, expand, fmt, fold, head, join, md5sum, nl, od, paste, pr, ptx
sha1sum, sort, split, sum, tac, tail, tr, tsort, unexpand, uniq, and wc.
See the file NEWS for a list of major changes in the current release.
See the file INSTALL for compilation and installation instructions.
I M P O R T A N T:
Some Cray C compilers lack support for a 32-bit arithmetic type.
Since gettext requires such a type, you should use the --disable-nls
option when invoking configure on such systems.
The textutils 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.
Note that the man pages are now automatically generated from templates
and from the --help usage message. Patches to the template files (man/*.x)
are welcome. However, the authoritative documentation is in texinfo form
in the doc directory.
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 standards document
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards.html, and the documentation
for automake and autoconf:
http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/autoconf.html,
http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/automake.html.
Mail suggestions and bug reports for these programs to
bug-textutils@gnu.org.
