Installing Coreutils-5.0

Approximate build time:  0.9 SBU
Required disk space:     69 MB

Official download location for Coreutils (5.0):
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/
And for the Coreutils Posixver Patch:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/patches/lfs/cvs/coreutils-5.0-posixver-2.patch

For its installation Coreutils depends on: Bash, Binutils, Coreutils, Diffutils, GCC, Gettext, Glibc, Grep, Make, Perl, Sed.

Installation of Coreutils

Coreutils has an issue when compiled against Glibc-2.3.3. Without the patch below, some of the Coreutils utilities (head, tail, sort etc) will reject their traditional syntax which has been in use for approximately 30 years. The old syntax is so pervasive that compatibility must be preserved until the many places where it is used can be updated. More details are provided in the comments inside the patch itself. Use of this patch is by no means compulsory but opting not to use it means you'll have deal with the consequences yourself, i.e. patch the many software packages that use the old syntax. Apply the patch:

patch -Np1 -i ../coreutils-5.0-posixver-2.patch

Now prepare Coreutils for compilation:

./configure --prefix=/tools

Compile the package:

make

As discussed earlier, we don't recommend running the test suites for the temporary tools here in this chapter. If you still want to run the Coreutils test suite anyway, the following command will do so:

make RUN_EXPENSIVE_TESTS=yes check

The meaning of the make parameter:

And install the package:

make install

The details on this package are found in the Section called Contents of Coreutils in Chapter 6.