(coreutils.info)Introduction

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1 Introduction
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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.  Note:
(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.