bug: GNU and uutils dirname handles paths ending in "/." differently #8910

• NixOS: 25.05
• uutils coreutils: 0.2.2

Hello! I am really excited about this project and wanted to try it out on my NixOS workstation but hit a pretty big bug with one of the tools I use. I searched around the repo and didn't spot any obvious matching reports and it seems that different behavior is a bug report.

On my system the uutils dirname command strips the last directory component when the path ends with /., which differs from GNU coreutils in a way that breaks homeshick.

This causes all of the generated symlinks they make to have incorrect relative paths. For example:

• Expected: ~/.zshrc -> .homesick/repos/dotfiles/home/.zshrc
• Actual: ~/.zshrc -> dos/.homesick/repos/dotfiles/home/.zshrc

Steps to Reproduce

$ dirname --version
dirname (uutils coreutils) 0.2.2
...

$ dirname /home/dos/.
/home

...

$ dirname --version
dirname (GNU coreutils) 9.7
...

$ dirname /home/dos/.
/home/dos