coreutils
Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Oct 2026
uutils coreutils is a from-scratch Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils: ls, cp, mv, rm, cat, sort, chmod and the rest of the basic commands every Linux machine runs. It's free under MIT. Ubuntu made it the default in 25.10, and Ubuntu 26.10 (released October 15, 2026) runs it for everything, cp, mv and rm included. It also builds for macOS, Windows and the BSDs.
On Ubuntu 25.10+ you already have it. Elsewhere, cargo install coreutils or a prebuilt release binary gets you going. The project treats any difference from GNU as a bug, and the 0.12.0 release passed 653 of the 674 GNU test-suite tests it ran (96.9%).
There's no paid tier and nothing is gated. Solo, small teams, larger teams: free. The real decision on Ubuntu servers: keep the default, or install coreutils-from-gnu until your scripts are tested.
The catch: the security record is young. Canonical's outside audit found 113 issues and 44 CVEs, and kept cp, mv and rm on GNU for the 26.04 LTS over race-condition bugs (a file swapped between a check and the action). Another wave of advisories followed in August and September 2026, several rated high, including local privilege escalation via chmod.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree: Everything. MIT license, no paid edition, no gated features. Ships as the default coreutils on Ubuntu 25.10 and later, fully (including cp, mv and rm) from Ubuntu 26.10.
Self-hosted: Nothing to host. It's a set of command-line programs: install with cargo install coreutils, build from source with Cargo or GNU Make, or download prebuilt binaries from GitHub releases. Runs on Linux, macOS, the BSDs, Windows and WASI. On Ubuntu you can switch back to GNU with the coreutils-from-gnu package.
Paid: There is no paid tier. The only cost is testing: shell scripts that depend on GNU edge-case behavior should be checked before a fleet moves to it.
Free under MIT with nothing gated. The cost is testing your scripts against it, since it's now what Ubuntu runs by default.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; already the default on Ubuntu 25.10 and later
- Small team
- free; test your shell scripts before upgrading
- Medium team
- free; pin GNU with coreutils-from-gnu on servers until scripts are validated
- Large team
- free; track the GitHub security advisories, which have been frequent through 2026
Get tools like this every Wednesday
One featured tool, three on the radar. No fluff.
A low score is not a verdict on quality. Young and niche tools start low by design. How we calculate scores
Trust Signals
About
- Owner
- Uutils (Organization)
- Stars
- 24,279
- Forks
- 2,101