Developer(s) GNU Project Operating system | Written in C | |
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Stable release 8.27 (March 8, 2017; 1 day ago (2017-03-08)) [±] Repository git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git Type Miscellaneous utilities | ||
The GNU Core Utilities or coreutils is a package of GNU software containing reimplementations for many of the basic tools, such as cat, ls, and rm, used on Unix-like operating systems.
Contents
History
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 GPLv2 to GPLv3.
Capabilities
The GNU core utilities support long options as parameters to the commands, as well as (unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set) the relaxed convention allowing options even after the regular arguments. Note that this environment variable enables a different functionality in BSD.
Alternatives
In the FOSS ecosystem there are alternative implementation packages available with slightly different scope and focus or license, for instance for embedded devices exists the GPLv2 licensed BusyBox and the BSD licensed Toybox.