The GNU Core Utilities or coreutils is a package of GNU

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consist ...

containing implementations for many of the basic tools, such as cat, ls, and rm, which are used on

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s. In September 2002, the ''GNU coreutils'' were created by merging the earlier packages ''textutils'', ''shellutils'', and ''fileutils'', along with some other miscellaneous utilities. In July 2007, the license of the GNU coreutils was updated from GPL-2.0-or-later to GPL-3.0-or-later. The GNU core utilities support long options as parameters to the commands, as well as the relaxed convention allowing options even after the regular arguments (unless the environment variable is set). Note that this environment variable enables a different functionality in BSD. See the

List of GNU Core Utilities commands This is a list of commands from the GNU Core Utilities for Unix environments. These commands can be found on Unix operating systems and most Unix-like operating systems. List See also * List of Unix commands * List of GNOME applications * List ...

for a brief description of included commands. Alternative implementation packages are available in the FOSS ecosystem, with a slightly different scope and focus, or license. For example,

BusyBox BusyBox is a software suite that provides several Unix utilities in a single executable file. It runs in a variety of POSIX environments such as Linux, Android, and FreeBSD, although many of the tools it provides are designed to work with inte ...

which is licensed under GPL-2.0-only, and

Toybox Toybox is a free and open-source software implementation of over 200 Unix command line utilities such as '' ls'', '' cp'', and '' mv''. The Toybox project was started in 2006, and became a 0BSD licensed BusyBox alternative. Toybox is used for mo ...

which is licensed under 0BSD.

Notes

References

External links

*
The Heirloom Toolchest
- An alternative set of utilities
opensource.com article: gnu-core-utilities on 4 Apr 2018 by David Both (Correspondent)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gnu Core Utilities Free software programmed in C Free system software Core Utilities Unix software