uutils Coreutils : A Comprehensive Guide To The Cross-Platform GNU Reimplementation In Rust

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.

To install it:

cargo install coreutils
~/.cargo/bin/coreutils

Goals

uutils aims to be a drop-in replacement for the GNU utils. Differences with GNU are treated as bugs.

uutils aims to work on as many platforms as possible, to be able to use the same utils on Linux, Mac, Windows and other platforms. This ensures, for example, that scripts can be easily transferred between platforms.

Documentation

uutils has both user and developer documentation available:

• User Manual
• Developer Documentation

Both can also be generated locally, the instructions for that can be found in the coreutils docs repository.

Requirements

• Rust (cargo, rustc)
• GNU Make (optional)

Rust Version

uutils follows Rust’s release channels and is tested against stable, beta and nightly. The current Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV) is 1.79.0.

Building

There are currently two methods to build the uutils binaries: either Cargo or GNU Make.

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

For more information click here.