GNU Core Utilities

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.

GNU Core Utilities

Developer(s)	GNU Project
Stable release	9.1[1]  / 15 April 2022
Repository	git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git
Written in	C, shell script[2]
Operating system	Unix-like
Type	Miscellaneous utilities
License	2007[lower-alpha 1]: GPL-3.0-or-later 2002[lower-alpha 2]: GPL-2.0-or-later
Website	www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/

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). Note that 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.