Coreutils for Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#21

Post by fabiensanglard » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

I wonder if the motivation is to make Ai agents work better on Windows?

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#22

Post by throwatdem12311 » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

Was not expecting EEE for Coreutils but I suppose it’s the natural consequence of the MIT license used for uutils so not totally unexpected.

It’s annoying enough to support the differences between BSD and Linux, and now Linux has GNU and uutils, and now we’re gonna need Windows variant of uutils…ugh.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#23

Post by thewebguyd » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #7

Nice. I appreciate the effort to make things less painful for powerusers. I had noticed some of these working already in PS. If anyone from MS is reading this can we please also get an equivalents (or even alias) for the thing that shows IP address? The windows equivalent of "ip a" is some convoluted PS command that I can never remember

in PowerShell there is a built-in alias.

> gip

You could also make your own alias if you specifically want to type "ip a" just add a powershell function to your $PROFILE. function ip { param($argument)...." etc. have it call Get-NetIPAddress, else fallback to ipconfig.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#24

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

dataflow wrote: post #6

So dir is not shipped due to conflict with built-ins, echo and rmdir are shipped despite conflicts, and sort is deemed not to have a conflict? What is the logic?

No idea, this is broken at start, I would expect at least a reasoning on how they expect to improve the mess going forward.

Otherwise just don't do it, if it is going to be a mess to work with.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#25

Post by 201984 » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

There's also a windows port of busybox if you want something more stable. w64devkit uses it.

https://github.com/rmyorston/busybox-w32

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#26

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

aniceperson wrote: post #19

they should give up on the backwards slash.

[deleted]

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#27

Post by orev » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

andai wrote: post #13

neskorodev wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From shred man: The shred command relies on a crucial assumption: that the file system and hardware overwrite data in place. ... many modern file system designs do not satisfy this assumption. Exceptions include: ... Log-structured or journaled file systems, such as. ... NTFS.

I think SSDs also randomize where data ends up? But I'm not sure if that's true for existing files too.

Yes. All of the assumptions made with shred and sdelete apply only for spinning HDDs. SSDs require different methods of wiping.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#28

Post by asveikau » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

I just have msys on my PATH.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#29

Post by hs86 » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

Would it make sense to add a prefix to all commands to avoid conflicts with built-in commands? Like how, on macOS and FreeBSD, installing GNU Coreutils adds a `g` prefix, Microsoft could add an `m` prefix to these commands.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#30

Post by jakegmaths » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

Windows really needs to ditch CRLF and just use LF, and switch from backslashes to forward slashes. Or better yet, just switch everything to full POSIX.

In powershell everything is much better than cmd, but it's just not enough.

WSL is generally great, but there are annoying downsides. I often get "catastrophic" crashes and the zone identifier files drive me nuts. Plus it takes so much longer to start VSCode when connecting with WSL, and now you've got two file systems. WSL1 was in many ways better than WSL2 for these reasons.