microsoft/coreutils

Coreutils for Windows

UNIX-style core utilities for Windows. The same commands and pipelines you use on Linux, macOS, and WSL - natively.

Install · Shell conflicts · Windows caveats · Contributing

A Microsoft-maintained build of uutils/coreutils, findutils, and grep packaged as a single multi-call binary for Windows. The goal is to make moving between Linux, macOS, WSL, containers, and Windows frictionless: the same commands, flags, and pipelines work the same way, so existing scripts carry over without translation.

Each command supports the standard --help flag for full syntax and options.

This project is in preview.

Install

Install Coreutils for Windows with WinGet:

winget install Microsoft.Coreutils

Or grab the latest build from our Release Page.

Creating custom alias

• PowerShell: Set-Alias ll 'ls' or a function in your $PROFILE for arguments, e.g. function ll { ls -la --color=auto @args }
• CMD: doskey ll=ls -la $*

[!WARNING] Using PowerShell aliases will cause binary stream compatibility. Some utilities will not work when piped (e.g. xargs, find, ...)

Shell conflicts

[!NOTE] Any command not mentioned is included in this suite. The following only lists conflicts.

[!NOTE] You can remove additional utilities using coreutils-manager disable <utility name>. See coreutils-manager --help for other management commands.

[!WARNING] PowerShell 7.4 or later is required. PowerShell 7.6 or later is recommended for ~ support.

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.

Legend: ✅ ships and works · ⚠️ ships but conflicts with a built-in · 🛑 not shipped

Windows caveats

PowerShell Command Parsing

The installer integrates itself with interactive PowerShell sessions via PSReadLine. It ensures that quoted expressions behave somewhat like they do under UNIX shells or CMD: echo *.txt will then print a number of file names, while echo '*.txt' will print "*.txt" literally.

There are two shortcomings, however:

• PowerShell's escape character is still `, not \
  While you may write find . \( -foo -bar \) with Bash, you still need to write find . `( -foo -bar `) in PowerShell.
• The integration rewrites interactive input, but it does not remove PowerShell's aliases
  Get-Command ls, Get-Help ls, etc., will still show ls, etc., as PowerShell built-ins or aliases. Due to limitations around PSNativeCommandPreserveBytePipe we cannot integrate ourselves in a more robust way with PowerShell.

Intentionally dropped

Commands that exist upstream but aren't shipped here because they rely on POSIX-only concepts, would break existing Windows scripts, or simply aren't useful on Windows.

• dd: Perhaps useful in the future.
• dircolors, shred, sync, uname: Not particularly useful on Windows.
• chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, groups, hostid, id, install, logname, mkfifo, mknod, nice, nohup, pinky, runcon, stdbuf, stty, tty, users, who: POSIX-only concepts unavailable on Windows.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for details on the repo layout and how changes flow between this repo and the upstream uutils projects.