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0.9.0

docs/src/release-notes/0.9.0.md

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Rust Coreutils 0.9.0 Release:

We are excited to announce the release of Rust Coreutils 0.9.0 - a release focused on safety and security. This cycle was shaped by a third-party security audit, driving extensive TOCTOU hardening and a sustained, project-wide effort to shrink the amount of unsafe code by removing it outright and migrating low-level syscalls from nix/libc to rustix. On top of that, we landed major zero-copy I/O performance work (splice/tee/pipe), broadened WebAssembly, Cygwin and Windows support, and continued contributing tests and bug reports upstream to GNU coreutils.

GNU Test Suite Compatibility:

Result0.8.00.9.0Change 0.8.0 to 0.9.0% Total 0.8.0% Total 0.9.0% Change 0.8.0 to 0.9.0
Pass630625-594.74%90.58%-4.16%
Skip148-62.11%1.16%-0.95%
Fail2156+353.16%8.12%+4.96%
Error01+10%0.14%+0.14%
Total665690+25 (new tests)

Note: The rise in failing tests is due to the upstream GNU test suite being extended, not to regressions on our side. We updated our GNU reference from 9.10 to 9.11 (PR #11922), which added 25 new tests (665 → 690). Many of these newly-introduced tests are not yet passing, which accounts for the jump from 21 to 56 failures; no previously-passing functionality regressed, and work is ongoing to address the new tests.

Highlights:

  • Security Hardening (Zellic audit)

    • A third-party security audit by Zellic reviewed the codebase; the findings - widely reported as 44 CVEs (see also the Ubuntu update and the corrode write-up Bugs Rust won't catch) - were concentrated in TOCTOU races and filesystem edge cases that Rust's type system does not prevent
    • It's worth noting that many of these CVEs are not memory-safety issues but differences in behavior from GNU coreutils that the audit identified; aligning our semantics with GNU resolves them
    • This release closes many of them: a new TOCTOU-resistant uucore::safe_copy module; TOCTOU fixes in cp, mv, and chmod recursive traversal; rm dot/dotdot path-parsing protection; nohup.out now created with mode 0600; and chroot now resolves all ids before chrooting

  • Reducing unsafe & migrating to rustix

    • A sustained, project-wide push to shrink the unsafe surface: dozens of unsafe removals across utilities, tests, fuzz targets and uucore (get_groups, make_fifo, build.rs, and more)
    • Migration from nix/libc to rustix across id, tr, timeout, sort, wc, tail, cp, who, factor, and core process/IO paths

  • Performance

    • splice()/tee()/pipe() fast paths landed across cat, wc, head, tail, yes, cp, tee, and unexpand (e.g. unexpand +7.5%, faster cp from a pipe on Linux, tee via raw syscalls, yes using the tee syscall)
    • Consolidated in a reworked uucore::pipes / buf_copy

  • GNU Compatibility & Upstream Collaboration

    • Reference bumped to GNU 9.11, which extended the suite with 25 new tests (the reason the failure count went up - see the note above; it is not a regression)
    • We continue to contribute tests and bug reports upstream to GNU coreutils, and our compatibility work keeps surfacing edge cases on both sides
    • New fixes across numfmt, date, tr, cksum, factor, head, stat, and sort

  • numfmt Overhaul

    • Precision handling, rejection of scientific notation, LC_NUMERIC decimal separator, zero-padding for negative numbers, IEC precision cap, large %f values, --to=auto exit code, and multi-byte --suffix width accounting

  • ls Improvements

    • ls -lF symlink target indicators, link-count column no longer inflated per-ACL-file, version-sorting and recursive-mode fixes, independent permissions-column width
    • Refactor letting crate users (e.g. nushell) call ls without writing everything to stdout

  • Cross-platform Reach

    • WASI/wasm support for ln, dd, mktemp, and tty.wasm; Cygwin CI and builds (date, stdbuf); Windows tty (incl. msys2 paths); OpenBSD triage improvements

  • Internationalization

    • numfmt and du now honor LC_NUMERIC for the decimal separator

  • Contributions: This release was made possible by 30 new contributors joining our community

Call to Action:

Try it in your browser - Online Playground powered by WebAssembly Help us translate - Contribute to Rust Coreutils on Weblate Sponsor us on GitHub to accelerate development: github.com/sponsors/uutils

What's Changed

cat

chroot

cksum

coreutils

cp

date

dd

df

dirname

du

echo

env

expr

factor

fmt

id

install

join

ln

logname

ls

md5sum

mkdir

mknod

mktemp

more

mv

nl

nohup

nproc

numfmt

od

paste

pathchk

pinky

pr

realpath

rm

rmdir

shred

sort

split

stat

stdbuf

stty

sum

sync

tail

tee

timeout

touch

tr

tty

unexpand

uniq

uptime

wc

who

yes

uucore

Security

Code Quality & Cleanup

CI & Build

Documentation

Platform Support

Dependency Updates

Version Management

New Contributors

Full Changelog: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/compare/0.8.0...0.9.0