The Rust replacement for GNU Coreutils fixes all of the Ubuntu-prioritized compatibility issues, eliminates expr’s last C dependency, and adds more security hardening.
Sometime in the wee hours of Thursday morning Eastern Time, uutils coreutils — better known as Rust Coreutils — 0.12.0 was released.
The project provides something of a Rust-written replacement for gnu coreutils, which is a collection of command-line utilities that’s found on almost all Linux distributions, and which includes commands such as ls, cp, mv, rm, mkdir, chmod, chown, cat, and others.
If you’re wondering “why Rust,” then you must be new here. These days, the Rust programming language is either the latest fad or the latest evolutionary step in programming, depending on who’s talking. Proponents talk about its memory safety and performance, and even key parts of the Linux kernel are being rewired in Rust.
It became Ubuntu’s default in last year’s release of Ubuntu 25.10, Questing Quokka, and since then most of the baby *buntus have followed suit. It’s also installed by default on AerynOS — the distro formerly known as Serpent — as well as Redox OS, which isn’t Linux, but is a rust-built Unix-like operating system with a microkernel design. It’s also optionally available in a number of other distros, including Fedora, Alpine Linux, OpenMandriva, Apertis, NixOS, and some Debian-derived distros.
If your distro were to switch to it during an update — and if the Rust Coreutils’ devs are being successful — you probably wouldn’t know. A design goal, according to the project’s online documentation, is that Rust Coreutils “should be a drop-in replacement for the GNU coreutils.”
The project developers say that this new release, which comes three days after the release of gnu coreutils 9.12, addresses all of the issues Ubuntu asked to be prioritized during this release cycle.
What’s New and What’s Fixed
According to the project’s release announcement, in addition to making the fixes requested by Ubuntu, the developer concentrated on “a long tail of smaller divergences from GNU”:
“Few of these are glamorous, but they are exactly what breaks a script that has worked for twenty years.”
This is precisely why, if your distro was to suddenly pull a switcheroo, you would be unlikely to realize any change had taken place. Less so than before, actually. Example? One of the fixes is to some commands that were previously not properly handling values beginning with a hyphen, but which are now handling them just like the GNU version.
“Alongside that, we removed the last C dependency of
expr(onigis replaced by the pure-Rustfancy-regex), continued the Windows port and landed another round of security hardening onls,sortandinstall.”
Oh, and for a little bit of an “inside baseball” look at coreutils:
“Also, some contributions had carried comments and code over from GNU coreutils, against our own rule that uutils is an original implementation. We reviewed the tree and rewrote what we found, in comments and in the few functions that followed the C too closely; no behaviour change. The GNU coreutils maintainers have been notified.”
You can download and install or find out more on the project’s GitHub page.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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