These are the GNU file management utilities.  Most of these programshave significant advantages over their Unix counterparts, such asgreater speed, additional options, and fewer arbitrary limits.The programs that can be built with this package are: chgrp, chmod,chown, cp, dd, df, dir, dircolors, du, install, ln, ls, mkdir, mkfifo,mknod, mv, rm, rmdir, shred, sync, touch, and vdir.See the file NEWS for a list of major changes in the current release.See the file INSTALL for compilation and installation instructions.The fileutils are intended to be POSIX.2 compliant (with BSD and otherextensions), like the rest of the GNU system.  They are almost there,but a few incompatibilities remain.The ls, dir, and vdir commands are all separate executables instead ofone program that checks argv[0] because people often rename theseprograms to things like gls, gnuls, l, etc.  Renaming a programfile shouldn't affect how it operates, so that people can get thebehavior they want with whatever name they want.Special thanks to Paul Eggert, Brian Matthews, Bruce Evans, Karl Berry,Kaveh Ghazi, and Fran鏾is Pinard for help with debugging and portingthese programs.  Many thanks to all of the people who have taken thetime to submit problem reports and fixes.  All contributed changes areattributed in the ChangeLog file.And thanks to the following people who have provided accounts forportability testing on many different types of systems: Bob Proulx,Christian Robert, Fran鏾is Pinard, Greg McGary, Harlan Stenn,Joel N. Weber, Mark D. Roth, Matt Schalit, Nelson H. F. Beebe,R閖ean Payette, Sam Tardieu.Thanks to Michael Stone for inflicting test releases on Debian'sunstable distribution, and to all the kind folks who used thatdistribution and found and reported bugs.Note that each man page is now automatically generated from a templateand from the corresponding --help usage message.  Patches to the templatefiles (man/*.x) are welcome.  However, the authoritative documentationis in texinfo form in the doc directory.If you run the tests on a SunOS4.1.4 system, expect the ctime-part ofthe ls `time-1' test to fail.  I believe that is due to a bug in theway Sun implemented link(2) and chmod(2).There are pretty many tests, but nowhere near as many as we need.Additions and corrections are very welcome.If you see a problem that you've already reported, feel free tore-report it -- it won't bother me to get a reminder.  Besides, themore messages I get regarding a particular problem the sooner it'llbe fixed -- usually.  If you sent a complete patch and I didn't applyit or get back to you, please let me know.WARNING:  If you modify files like configure.in, m4/*.m4, aclocal.m4,or any Makefile.am, then don't be surprised if what gets regenerated nolonger works.  To make things work, you'll have to be using appropriateversions of automake and autoconf.As for what versions are `appropriate', I regret that I have been unableto use unmodified versions of autoconf and automake in generatingbuild/configure-related files.  For automake, I used the developmentsources (from cvs) as of 2001-03-11.  For autoconf, I used autoconf-2.49ewith the two patches described in recent fileutils ChangeLog entries.Note however, that in principle at least, the next release of each ofthose packages should work well.These programs all recognize the `--version' option.  When reportingbugs, please include in the subject line both the package name/versionand the name of the program for which you found a problem.For general documentation on the coding and usage standardsthis distribution follows, see the GNU Coding Standards,http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html.Mail suggestions and bug reports for these programs tobug-fileutils@gnu.org