uutils coreutils
uutils coreutils is a cross-platform reimplementation of the GNU coreutils in
Rust. While all programs have been implemented, some
options might be missing or different behavior might be experienced.
We provide prebuilt binaries, manpages, and shell completions from main branch at https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/releases/tag/latest-commit .
The latest stable tag https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/releases/latest also exists for reproducible products and packagers.
Bug reporters should use binary from latest commit.
Minimal compatible glibc version is same with ubuntu-latest runner. Use coreutils-*-musl if coreutils-*-gnu is not compatible with your system.
Goals
uutils coreutils aims to be a drop-in replacement for the GNU utils. Differences with GNU
are treated as bugs.
Our key objectives include:
- Matching GNU's output (stdout and error code) exactly
- Better error messages: at a terminal, a parse error is shown as a
compiler-style report with a caret under the argument at fault, where GNU
prints a single line (see error diagnostics);
scripts and pipes still get the plain GNU message
- Providing comprehensive internationalization support (UTF-8)
- Continuously improving performance; significant slowdowns relative to other coreutils implementations
are treated as bugs
- Extensions when relevant (example: --progress)
uutils aims to work on as many platforms as possible, to be able to use the same
utils on Linux, macOS, *BSD, Windows, WASI and other platforms. This ensures, for example,
that scripts can be easily transferred between platforms.
uutils coreutils ships by default on Ubuntu since version 25.10.
Documentation
uutils has both user and developer documentation available:
Both can also be generated locally, the instructions for that can be found in
the coreutils docs repository.
Use weblate/rust-coreutils to translate the Rust coreutils into your language.
You can try the utilities in your browser through the
WebAssembly playground, without
installing anything.
Building
There are currently two methods to build the uutils binaries: either Cargo or
GNU Make.
Building the full package, including all documentation, requires both Cargo
and GNU Make on a Unix platform.
For either method, we first need to fetch the repository:
git clone https://github.com/uutils/coreutils
cd coreutils
Cargo
Building uutils using Cargo is easy because the process is the same as for every
other Rust program:
cargo build --release
Replace --release with --profile=release-small to optimize binary size.
This command builds the most portable common core set of uutils into a multicall
(BusyBox-type) binary, named 'coreutils', on most Rust-supported platforms.
Additional platform-specific uutils are often available. Building these expanded
sets of uutils for a platform (on that platform) is as simple as specifying it
as a feature:
cargo build --release --features windows
# or ...
cargo build --release --features unix
# or ...
cargo build --release --target wasm32-wasip1 --no-default-features --features feat_wasm
To build SELinux-specific features, including chcon and runcon, ensure that libselinux
and libclang are installed on your system. Then, run the following command:
cargo build --release --features unix,feat_selinux
To speed up the checksum utilities (md5sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
sha384sum, sha512sum, and cksum) by using OpenSSL's libcrypto instead of
the pure-Rust digest crates, enable the openssl feature:
cargo build --release --features openssl
By default OpenSSL is built from source and statically linked into the
binary, so no runtime dependency on system libcrypto/libssl is added. To link
dynamically against the system libcrypto instead, set OPENSSL_NO_VENDOR=1 at build time.
MinGW (Windows) needs OPENSSL_STATIC=0 too for dynamic linkage.
The speedup is largest on CPUs without SHA-NI hardware acceleration.
aws-lc backend is used on MSVC. Setting AWS_LC_SYS_NO_JITTER_ENTROPY=1
at build time is recommended to reduce size of binary.
If you don't want to build every utility available on your platform into the
final binary, you can also specify which ones you want to build manually. For
example:
cargo build --features "base32 cat echo rm" --no-default-features
If you want to build the utilities as individual binaries, that is also possible:
cargo build --release --bins --workspace --exclude coreutils --exclude uu_runcon --exclude uu_chcon
Each utility is contained in its own package within the main repository, named "uu_UTILNAME". To
build selected individual utilities, use the --package [aka -p] option. For example:
cargo build -p uu_base32 -p uu_cat -p uu_echo -p uu_rm
GNU Make
Building using make is a simple process as well.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
