This manual is a work in progress: many sections make no attempt to explain basic concepts in a way suitable for novices. Thus, if you are interested, please get involved in improving this manual. The entire GNU community will benefit.
The GNU utilities documented here are mostly compatible with the POSIX standard.
Please report bugs to bug-coreutils@gnu.org. Include the version number, machine architecture, input files, and any other information needed to reproduce the bug: your input, what you expected, what you got, and why it is wrong.
If you have a problem with sort or date, try using the
--debug option, as it can often help find and fix problems without
having to wait for an answer to a bug report. If the debug output
does not suffice to fix the problem on your own, please compress and
attach it to the rest of your bug report.
Although diffs are welcome, please include a description of the problem as well, since this is sometimes difficult to infer. See Bugs in Using and Porting GNU CC.
This manual was originally derived from the Unix man pages in the
distributions, which were written by David MacKenzie and updated by Jim
Meyering. What you are reading now is the authoritative documentation
for these utilities; the man pages are no longer being maintained. The
original fmt man page was written by Ross Paterson. François
Pinard did the initial conversion to Texinfo format. Karl Berry did the
indexing, some reorganization, and editing of the results. Brian
Youmans of the Free Software Foundation office staff combined the
manuals for textutils, fileutils, and sh-utils to produce the present
omnibus manual. Richard Stallman contributed his usual invaluable
insights to the overall process.