GNU Coreutils 9.4 Adds Experimental "--enable-systemd" Option, Faster Split

GNU Coreutils 9.4 is out today as the latest version of this collection of utilities common to GNU/Linux systems and other platforms.

GNU Coreutils 9.4 adds a new "--enable-systemd" option for Linux systems with systemd in use. This is used to deal with the punky, uptime, users, and who commands that misbehave currently on 32-bit platforms like x86 and Arm. When enabling the systemd integration with GNU Coreutils, the pinky, uptime, and who commands can now work for times after the year 2038 on 32-bit systems. The --enable-systemd option is considered experimental with today's v9.4 release.

GNU Coreutil's split command is also now faster with the v9.4 release. Split now uses more-tuned access patterns for large input. When running split on an solid-state storage (SSD) backed device, Split's throughput performance was about 5% faster for reads.

Other changes include the uptime command now working on some Android distributions, split now honors the $TMPDIR environment variable, the uptime command counting VM saved/sleep time, and more than one dozen bug fixes.

More details on the GNU Coreutils 9.4 changes can be found via the GNU.org release announcement.