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,
sort, split, sum, tac, tail, tr, 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.

If you are using a version of the Linux libc that predates 4.4.1,
you should get a newer version.  The old libraries contain getopt
functions that are incompatible with several of these utilities.  For
instance, when built with the obsolete getopt functions, `tail +10' and
`uniq +3' will give usage errors instead of the expected results.

There is a known bug in the pr program.  It doesn't work properly when
the first character in an input file is a form feed.

I M P O R T A N T:

  If you are building on a NextStep 3.2 system, you may have to run
  configure with CC='cc -Dmemcmp=memcmp_local' to avoid a link error
  due to their buggy linker.  Do not use the Next C compiler's -posix
  option to work around the linker problem: the POSIX libraries seem
  to be buggy and although the build will complete without errors,
  the resulting programs will fail in subtle ways. See INSTALL for
  details on how to run configure using a specified value for CC.

  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Note that the distributed man pages are no longer being updated.
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 on
prep.ai.mit.edu:pub/gnu/standards.*, especially the `Makefile
Conventions', `Configuration', and `User Interfaces' sections.

Mail suggestions and bug reports for these programs to
bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu.
