coreutils/coreutils

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

5268 stars · 1067 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

GNU coreutils is the standard collection of GNU command-line utilities (ls, cp, mv, cat, sort, chmod, etc.) that form the basis of most Unix-like systems. It merges the former fileutils, sh-utils, and textutils packages and conforms to POSIX with extensions.

Use cases

• manipulate files from the command line
• compute file checksums like sha256sum
• sort and process text streams in shell scripts
• get a POSIX-compliant set of Unix utilities on macOS
• contribute to or study foundational GNU C code

When to choose

• you need the canonical GNU implementations of standard Unix commands
• you want utilities with more options and fewer limits than BSD counterparts
• you're building a Linux distribution or minimal system

When to avoid

• you need a modern alternative with JSON output or colored defaults like uutils or exa
• you're targeting Windows-only environments without a POSIX layer
• you want a lightweight busybox-style single binary

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

cli file-system developer-tools developer-tools operating-systems cli cross-platform gnu core-utilities posix shell-tools c command-line linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="coreutils/coreutils")