GNU coreutils 9.9: Detailed Test report 01/20

[ChrisDryden]

GNU coreutils Test Coverage Tracking

Failing GNU tests as of 2026-01-20 | Test Coverage Dashboard

Overview

With the number of failing tests now small enough to track individually, this document provides detailed descriptions of each remaining test failure and the next steps needed to achieve full GNU compatibility. Theres a bunch of duplicate PR's for the same tests in the PR queue now and I'm hoping this will allow us to consolidate our efforts.

I am also hoping to separate the tests that are incompatible because they either intercept glibc calls or call gdb on specific lines of source code since we are unable to fix those tests and it wouldn't be good to track compatibility of those tests.

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FAILED

[ ] cp/cp-a-selinux.sh - PR #10207

GNU Test | Fix cp -a SELinux xattr handling and -z flag for folders

[ ] date/date-debug.sh

GNU Test | Debug output for date parsing

[x] date/date-ethiopia.sh - PR #10473

GNU Test | Ethiopian calendar translation support

[x] date/date-iran.sh - PR #10473

GNU Test | Iranian/Persian calendar translation support

[x] date/date-thailand.sh - PR #10473

GNU Test | Thai calendar translation support

[ ] date/date.pl

GNU Test | Comprehensive date parsing tests

[x] fold/fold-zero-width.sh - PR #9274

GNU Test | Zero-width character handling in fold

[ ] ls/stat-free-symlinks.sh - PR #8728

GNU Test | Iterative loop for ls recursive directory search (prevents stack overflow)

[ ] misc/close-stdout.sh

GNU Test | Proper handling of closed stdout

[ ] misc/stdbuf.sh

GNU Test | Line/block buffering with fifos

[x] misc/unexpand.pl - PR #9265

GNU Test | Tab unexpansion edge cases

[ ] misc/write-errors.sh

GNU Test | Write error handling and reporting

[ ] nproc/nproc-quota-systemd.sh

GNU Test | Cgroup quota and kernel scheduler handling via systemd

[ ] numfmt/numfmt.pl

GNU Test | Number formatting comprehensive tests

[ ] pr/pr-tests.pl

GNU Test | Page formatting tests

[ ] rm/one-file-system.sh - PR #7569

GNU Test | --one-file-system and --preserve-root=all implementation

[x] sort/sort-h-thousands-sep.sh - PR #9848

GNU Test | Human-readable sort with thousands separators

[ ] sort/sort-month.sh - PR #9722

GNU Test | Locale-aware month parsing (ICU), handles "janv." and Latin-1

[x] sort/sort.pl - PR #9862

GNU Test | GNU coreutils compatibility for comprehensive sort tests

[ ] tail/follow-name.sh

GNU Test | Follow renamed/recreated files

[ ] tail/inotify-rotate-resources.sh

GNU Test | Inotify resource handling during log rotation

[X] tail/symlink.sh - PR #10158

GNU Test | Symlink following behavior

[x] timeout/timeout.sh - PR #10254

GNU Test | Signal propagation to child processes and SIGPIPE handling

SKIPPED

[ ] id/gnu-zero-uids.sh

GNU Test | Handling of UID 0

[ ] tail/inotify-dir-recreate.sh

GNU Test | Directory recreation with inotify

[x] timeout/timeout-group.sh - PR #10254

GNU Test | sigtimedwait() instead of 100ms polling (100ms → 1ms)

INCOMPATIBLE

Tests that use LD_PRELOAD to intercept glibc calls or gdb breakpoints. If we don't use the same internal calls, we will have to patch these tests.

df/skip-duplicates.sh (LD_PRELOAD)

GNU Test | Intercepts glibc to inject duplicate mount entries

rm/r-root.sh (LD_PRELOAD + gdb)

GNU Test | Uses gdb breakpoints and LD_PRELOAD for safety net

rm/rm-readdir-fail.sh (LD_PRELOAD) - PR #9604

GNU Test | Intercepts readdir to simulate failures

PR #9604 wraps libc calls to handle LD_PRELOAD tests.

tail/inotify-race.sh (gdb) - PR #9908

GNU Test | Uses gdb breakpoints to trigger race conditions

PR #9908 patches the test to use Rust gdb breakpoints (breaking on watcher_rx.watch_with_parent in watch.rs).

tail/inotify-race2.sh (gdb) - PR #9908

GNU Test | Uses gdb breakpoints to trigger race conditions

PR #9908 patches the test to use Rust gdb breakpoints (breaking on watcher_rx.watch_with_parent in watch.rs).

ERROR

[ ] misc/usage_vs_getopt.sh - PR #9869

GNU Test | Usage message consistency with getopt

The coreutils multicall binary doesn't use clap for argument parsing, so unrecognized options like --unknown were outputting "function/utility not found" instead of "unrecognized option". PR #9869 fixes this by detecting option-like arguments.

[oech3]

Also

coreutils/util/build-gnu.sh

Lines 157 to 159 in 43fcff8

	# Remove tests checking for --version & --help
	# Not really interesting for us and logs are too big
	sed -i '/tests\/help\/help-version.sh/ D' Makefile

[max-amb]

For misc/close-stdout.sh how do we want to approach it. As indicated in #9664 it seems that we can just implement a check in each of the effected utils. What are thoughts on this?

Or we could do something more central, perhaps in uucore_procs?

[ChrisDryden]

This was the approach I was imagining: #10494

The two main utils that need additional checks are cp and mkdir, because the expectation is that it errors out before the actual operations occur

[ChrisDryden]

The stat-free-symlinks.sh and misc/usage_vs_getopt.sh actually have the same root cause. If we can find a way to not load the translation files until they are actually required then it will solve stat-free-symlinks and it will also be able to unblock merging the usage_vs_getopt.sh test PR.

[oech3]

Let's close and repoen new one for 9.10