Hi,

For context, I co-maintain GNU coreutils upstream.

I see that Debian updated to coreutils-9.12. In it we made a quoting
change to 'env' and 'printenv' which were a bit too aggressive. A large
part of the rationale was improved robustness, avoiding applications
getting confused with environment variables that may have newlines or
other strange characters. Here is the pre-9.12 behavior:

    $ env -i ENV='hello'$'\n''FAKE_ENV=goodbye' env
    ENV=hello
    FAKE_ENV=goodbye

Here is the 9.12 behavior, making it clear that FAKE_ENV is not an
environment variable:

    $ env -i ENV='hello'$'\n''FAKE_ENV=goodbye' ~/.local/bin/env
    ENV='hello'$'\n''FAKE_ENV=goodbye'

However, this caused some issues that we did not foresee from our
scanning of Debian Code Search [1] [2].

I suggest applying a patch we made after the 9.12 release [3], which quotes
only when standard output is a terminal. This avoids the issues that
arose from the change in 9.12. Apologies for the additional work.

P.S., while you are there, I also suggest adding libcap-dev to the
Build-Depends. Currently, on Debian, the package is being built without
capability support since libsystemd, which coreutils depends on, no
longer brings in libcap as a dependency. I reported that, along with a
patch in 1150670 [4].

Collin

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2026-09/msg00061.html
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2026-09/msg00062.html
[3] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/782a1e5bc2090212273bb731dceee2cc2a071e54.patch
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1150670

Hi Collin,

thanks, I've just uploaded 9.12-0.3 with that.

indeed, thanks. I've also did that in 9.12-0.3.

Regards,
Daniel

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
coreutils, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 1152651@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Daniel Baumann <daniel@debian.org> (supplier of updated coreutils package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2026 00:01:30 +0100
Source: coreutils
Architecture: source
Version: 9.12-0.3
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org>
Changed-By: Daniel Baumann <daniel@debian.org>
Closes: 1150670 1152651
Changes:
 coreutils (9.12-0.3) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * Non-maintainer upload.
   * Cherry-picking patch from upstream:
     - relax env,printenv: only quote when outputting to terminals
       [GH: 355] (Closes: #1152651).
   * Adding direct libcap-dev to build-depends to bring back building with
     capability support, was previously pulled in via libsystemd-dev, thanks to
     Collin Funk <collin.funk1@gmail.com> (Closes: #1150670).
   * Removed some useless whitespaces in packaging files at EOL.
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 8f0cb0d512acdd7daeb95cd31bc6484bbdeddeee 24700 coreutils_9.12-0.3.debian.tar.xz
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