GoKawiil
Tech News
Ubuntu has finished replacing the traditional GNU coreutils package with a Rust-based implementation across its system utilities. This marks a major step in the distribution's broader effort to rewrite core system components in memory-safe Rust rather than C.
Canonical's Ubuntu 26.10 completes its migration to Rust-written core utilities after resolving TOCTOU security flaws that had forced cp, mv and rm to remain on their GNU versions in 26.04 LTS. The release, codenamed 'Stonking Stingray', now ships a full uutils suite covering tools like ls, cat, chmod and du.
The uutils project's coreutils release 0.11.0 introduces caret-style error reporting, similar to Rust's compiler, for commands whose arguments act as mini-languages, such as tr, cut, chmod and sort. When a parse error occurs and stderr is a terminal, the tool now echoes the offending argument, points a caret at the exact problem spot, and often adds a help line explaining correct syntax. The feature was inspired by uutils' own awk implementation, which already used similar diagnostics for parsing awk scripts.