Gash-Utils 0.2.0 released

[Timothy Sample]

Hi everyone,

I am pleased to report that I just released version 0.2.0 of Gash-Utils!
You can download the new release at:

    https://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/gash/gash-utils-0.2.0.tar.gz

(You can find the GPG signature by appending “.sig” to the above URL.)

This release has many significant improvements over 0.1.0.  In
particular, the implementation of Awk is now nearly feature complete
(vis-à-vis POSIX).  There are many improvements to Sed, the 'sort'
utility, and the 'printf' utility, as well.  I’ve pasted an excerpt of
the NEWS file below.

Next up is to land this version in Guix, which will greatly simplify the
bootstrap process there.

For the future, I would like to focus on two things (very much in order
of importance to me at the moment):

  1. Port to Mes;
  2. Restructure the modules to make them more useful as a Scheme
  library.

Enjoy!


-- Tim


Noteworthy changes in release 0.2.0 (2022-03-12)
================================================

New features

  - awk has been mostly rewritten, and now supports most of the
    standard POSIX features.
  - The env utility.
  - sort understands the 'check', 'dictionary-order', 'ignore-case',
    'ignore-nonprinting', 'ignore-blanks', 'field-separator', and 'key'
    options.
  - sed supports the 'c', 'P', and 'D' functions.
  - printf actually formats strings, and supports the 's', 'c', 'd',
    'u', 'x', 'X', and '%' format specifiers.  It also supports flags,
    width, and precision for numeric format specifiers.
  - tar can read some GNU extensions (long name and long link).
  - sed understands the 'separate' option, and turns it off by default.
    This is instead of the old behavior, which was to always treat files
    separately.
  - cp supports the 'preserve' option.
  - tar guesses the compressor from the file name when creating
    archives.
  - sed ignores comments.
  - tar will accept but ignore the 'files-from' and 'auto-compress'
    options for compatibility's sake.
  - rm prints a warning if no files are specified (unless the 'force'
    flag is in effect).
  - rm accepts the 'help' and 'version' options.

Bug fixes

  - The 'n' sed function now respects the 'quiet' option.
  - The 'n' sed function now works on the final input line.
  - sed no longer fails to parse regexes with collating symbols,
    equivalence classes, and character classes.
  - Range addresses in sed can now match more than once.
  - rm now continues to process files after an error.
  - rmdir no longer prints debugging output.
  - mkdir no longer inverts the file mode value.
  - tar can now unpack non-ASCII files.
  - The main sed loop is now tail-recursive on the bootstrap Guile
    (2.0.9), allowing it to handle larger files.
  - mv now considers an empty file list an error.
  - ls now knows the difference between dotfiles and relative paths
    beginning with dots (e.g., "./foo").
  - sed address delimiters can now be escaped if needed.
  - uname now understands no flags to mean 'kernel-flags'.
  - tar now allows 'f' anywhere in a command string instead of only at
    the end.
  - sed will no longer continue to process files after executing the 'q'
    function.  It used to quit processing only the current file.