GoKawiilMicrosoft announced today at its Build 2026 developer conference the release of Coreutils for Windows, bringing many commonly used Linux command-line utilities to Windows as native applications.
The project is based on the open-source uutils project, a cross-platform rewrite of the GNU coreutils in Rust, and is designed to make it easier for developers to switch between Linux, macOS, Windows, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) without changing workflows.
"Developers constantly move between platforms, but familiar commands don't work consistently, forcing workarounds, lost speed and context switching," announced Microsoft.
"To address this, we've built Coreutils for Windows from the uutils open-source project, a cross-platform reimplementation of GNU Coreutils in Rust. These are Linux-like command-line utilities that run natively on Windows."
According to Microsoft, the goal is to make existing commands and tools work across platforms so that scripts can be used on Windows without modification or other tools.
The Coreutils for Windows project has also been released on GitHub as a Microsoft-maintained package that combines uutils/coreutils, findutils, and a GNU-compatible grep implementation into a single binary.
Linux utilities running natively on Windows
Coreutils for Windows includes numerous commands commonly used in Linux, such as cat, cp, find, grep, hostname, ls, mv, pwd, rm, sleep, tee, and uptime.
The utilities can be installed through WinGet using the following command:
winget install Microsoft.Coreutils
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