GNU Coreutils 9.2 - Now Avoids cp/mv Allocating Too Much Memory

GNU Coreutils 9.2 is out today as the newest feature update to this widely relied upon collection of core utilities commonly found on Linux systems as well as other platforms.

GNU Coreutils 9.2 has a wide variety of new features, bug fixes, and other enhancements. Some of the Coreutils 9.2 changes catching my interest include:

- The cp, mv, and install commands now avoid allocating too much memory. With the behavior on prior releases it's possible to trigger memory exhaustion failures on file-systems like ZFS. This issue had been happening since GNU Coreutils 6.0.

- The rm command will now fail gracefully when memory is exhausted.

- The cp, mv, and install commands will now also immediate acknowledge transient errors when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files with file-systems like XFS and Btrfs.

- stty now properly wraps output for the terminal width.

- The "wc -c" command will now efficiently determine the size of large files on all systems, fixing an issue from earlier releases.

- Coreutils programs now support the new Ronna (R) and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes for 10^27 and 10^30.

- The mv command now supports a "--no-copy" option where it will fail when trying to move a file to a different file-system.

- The cp --sparse=auto, mv, and install commands will now use the copy_file_range system call with sparse files for more efficient copies.

More details on the GNU Coreutils 9.2 changes via its release announcement.