GNU Core Utilities

Package of software containing basic utilities used on Unix-like operating systems / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The GNU Core Utilities or coreutils is a package of GNU software containing implementations for many of the basic tools, such as cat, ls, and rm, which are used on Unix-like operating systems.

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GNU Core Utilities
Developer(s)GNU Project
Stable release
9.2[1] Edit this on Wikidata / 20 March 2023
Repository
Written inC, shell script[2]
Operating systemUnix-like
TypeMiscellaneous utilities
License2007[lower-alpha 1]: GPL-3.0-or-later
2002[lower-alpha 2]: GPL-2.0-or-later
Websitewww.gnu.org/software/coreutils/
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In September 2002, the GNU coreutils were created by merging the earlier packages textutils, shellutils, and fileutils, along with some other miscellaneous utilities.[3] In July 2007, the license of the GNU coreutils was updated from GPL-2.0-or-later to GPL-3.0-or-later.[4]

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 POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set). This environment variable enables a different functionality in BSD.

See the List of GNU Core Utilities commands 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 which is licensed under GPL-2.0-only, and Toybox which is licensed under 0BSD.