coreutils: Introduction

 
 1 Introduction
 **************
 
 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 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.  ⇒
 (gcc)Bugs.
 
    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.