Coreutils for Windows

gigel82

Native Coreutils for Windows is genuinely some good news coming from Microsoft.

NewsaHackO

In the intentionally dropped section, it lists shed as "Not particularly useful on Windows." Does anyone know why? Is thre already a shred-like command in Windows?

dovholuknf

FINALLY. This is actually exciting to me... Mind you the linux ports (cygwin, msys2, git bash) are all great to have and I make sure one version or the other is always on my path but having MS maintain them (assuming they continue to do so) is great news

dataflow

So dir is not shipped due to conflict with built-ins, echo and rmdir are shipped despite conflicts, and sort is deemed not to have a conflict? What is the logic?

Havoc

Nice. I appreciate the effort to make things less painful for powerusers. I had noticed some of these working already in PS. If anyone from MS is reading this can we please also get an equivalents (or even alias) for the thing that shows IP address? The windows equivalent of "ip a" is some convoluted PS command that I can never remember

rvz

Exactly. The best Linux distro is Windows.

raggi

uutils coreutils was/is already available and more complete than this

pjmlp

> Several commands share names with built-ins in CMD and PowerShell. Whether the Coreutils version runs depends on the shell, the PATH order, and (for PowerShell) the alias table. Well this is not very satisfying, what about proving a way where it actually works without us having to guess where the failure root cause happens to be?

testdelacc1

A fair question is why this fork of coreutils is required when the original Rust rewrite ( https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/ ) supports Windows, in addition to Linux, macOS and wasm. The reason seems to be a few windows specific fixes ( https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/compare/main...microsoft... ) which can probably be upstreamed into the main repo.

aniceperson

they should give up on the backwards slash.

fabiensanglard

I wonder if the motivation is to make Ai agents work better on Windows?

throwatdem12311

Was not expecting EEE for Coreutils but I suppose it’s the natural consequence of the MIT license used for uutils so not totally unexpected. It’s annoying enough to support the differences between BSD and Linux, and now Linux has GNU and uutils, and now we’re gonna need Windows variant of uutils…ugh.

201984

There's also a windows port of busybox if you want something more stable. w64devkit uses it. https://github.com/rmyorston/busybox-w32

asveikau

I just have msys on my PATH.

hs86

Would it make sense to add a prefix to all commands to avoid conflicts with built-in commands? Like how, on macOS and FreeBSD, installing GNU Coreutils adds a `g` prefix, Microsoft could add an `m` prefix to these commands.

jakegmaths

Windows really needs to ditch CRLF and just use LF, and switch from backslashes to forward slashes. Or better yet, just switch everything to full POSIX. In powershell everything is much better than cmd, but it's just not enough. WSL is generally great, but there are annoying downsides. I often get "catastrophic" crashes and the zone identifier files drive me nuts. Plus it takes so much longer to start VSCode when connecting with WSL, and now you've got two file systems. WSL1 was in many ways better than WSL2 for these reasons.

p-t

Is this only on windows 11 or does it support 10 as well? (i cant access the site rn because of wifi)

EvanAnderson

I would have liked to see head, tail, tr, uniq, and cut. I end up dragging over the old "gnuwin32" versions of those to a lot of Windows machines. Those are my go-to tools for quick-and-dirty log analysis. I know I could use Powershell for those kinds of tasks, and I certainly do make a lot of use of Powershell, but the familiarity of those simple tools and the decades-old "muscle memory" of using them on various Unix, Linux, and Windows boxes makes them hard to ditch.

rfgplk

Isn't this just a restricted uutils fork? With most functionality culled for no good reason? "uname isn't useful on Windows" how? OSName/ Build numbers / systeminfo all exist?

natas

No thanks, I'd rather use linux.