uutils is an attempt at writing universal (as in cross-platform) CLI utilities in Rust. This repository is intended to aggregate GNU coreutils rewrites.

Many GNU, Linux and other utilities are useful, and obviously some effort has been spent in the past to port them to Windows. However, those projects are written in platform-specific C, a language considered unsafe compared to Rust, and have other issues.

Rust provides a good, platform-agnostic way of writing systems utilities that are easy to compile anywhere, and this is as good a way as any to try and learn it.

• Rust (cargo, rustc)
• GNU Make (required to build documentation)
• Sphinx (for documentation)
• gzip (for installing documentation)

uutils follows Rust's release channels and is tested against stable, beta and nightly. The current oldest supported version of the Rust compiler is 1.47.

On both Windows and Redox, only the nightly version is tested currently.

There are currently two methods to build the uutils binaries: either Cargo or GNU Make.

Building the full package, including all documentation, requires both Cargo and Gnu Make on a Unix platform.

For either method, we first need to fetch the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/uutils/coreutils
$ cd coreutils

Building uutils using Cargo is easy because the process is the same as for every other Rust program:

$ cargo build --release

This command builds the most portable common core set of uutils into a multicall (BusyBox-type) binary, named 'coreutils', on most Rust-supported platforms.

Additional platform-specific uutils are often available. Building these expanded sets of uutils for a platform (on that platform) is as simple as specifying it as a feature:

$ cargo build --release --features macos
# or ...
$ cargo build --release --features windows
# or ...
$ cargo build --release --features unix

If you don't want to build every utility available on your platform into the final binary, you can also specify which ones you want to build manually. For example:

$ cargo build --features "base32 cat echo rm" --no-default-features

If you don't want to build the multicall binary and would prefer to build the utilities as individual binaries, that is also possible. Each utility is contained in its own package within the main repository, named "uu_UTILNAME". To build individual utilities, use cargo to build just the specific packages (using the --package [aka -p] option). For example:

$ cargo build -p uu_base32 -p uu_cat -p uu_echo -p uu_rm

Building using make is a simple process as well.

To simply build all available utilities:

$ make

To build all but a few of the available utilities:

$ make SKIP_UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2'

To build only a few of the available utilities:

$ make UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2'

Likewise, installing can simply be done using:

$ cargo install --path .

This command will install uutils into Cargo's bin folder (e.g. $HOME/.cargo/bin).

This does not install files necessary for shell completion. For shell completion to work, use GNU Make or see Manually install shell completions.

To install all available utilities:

$ make install

To install using sudo switch -E must be used:

$ sudo -E make install

To install all but a few of the available utilities:

$ make SKIP_UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' install

To install only a few of the available utilities:

$ make UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' install

To install every program with a prefix (e.g. uu-echo uu-cat):

$ make PROG_PREFIX=PREFIX_GOES_HERE install

To install the multicall binary:

$ make MULTICALL=y install

Set install parent directory (default value is /usr/local):

# DESTDIR is also supported
$ make PREFIX=/my/path install

Installing with make installs shell completions for all installed utilities for bash, fish and zsh. Completions for elvish and powershell can also be generated; See Manually install shell completions.

The standard package set of NixOS provides this package out of the box since 18.03:

$ nix-env -iA nixos.uutils-coreutils

The coreutils binary can generate completions for the bash, elvish, fish, powershell and zsh shells. It prints the result to stdout.

The syntax is:

cargo run completion <utility> <shell>

So, to install completions for ls on bash to /usr/local/share/bash-completion/completions/ls, run:

cargo run completion ls bash > /usr/local/share/bash-completion/completions/ls

Un-installation differs depending on how you have installed uutils. If you used Cargo to install, use Cargo to uninstall. If you used GNU Make to install, use Make to uninstall.

To uninstall uutils:

$ cargo uninstall uutils

To uninstall all utilities:

$ make uninstall

To uninstall every program with a set prefix:

$ make PROG_PREFIX=PREFIX_GOES_HERE uninstall

To uninstall the multicall binary:

$ make MULTICALL=y uninstall

To uninstall from a custom parent directory:

# DESTDIR is also supported
$ make PREFIX=/my/path uninstall

Testing can be done using either Cargo or make.

Just like with building, we follow the standard procedure for testing using Cargo:

$ cargo test

By default, cargo test only runs the common programs. To run also platform specific tests, run:

$ cargo test --features unix

If you would prefer to test a select few utilities:

$ cargo test --features "chmod mv tail" --no-default-features

If you also want to test the core utilities:

$ cargo test  -p uucore -p coreutils

To debug:

$ gdb --args target/debug/coreutils ls
(gdb) b ls.rs:79
(gdb) run

To simply test all available utilities:

$ make test

To test all but a few of the available utilities:

$ make SKIP_UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' test

To test only a few of the available utilities:

$ make UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' test

To include tests for unimplemented behavior:

$ make UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' SPEC=y test

This testing functionality is only available on *nix operating systems and requires make.

To run busybox tests for all utilities for which busybox has tests

$ make busytest

To run busybox tests for a few of the available utilities

$ make UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' busytest

To pass an argument like "-v" to the busybox test runtime

$ make UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' RUNTEST_ARGS='-v' busytest

To run locally:

$ bash util/build-gnu.sh
$ bash util/run-gnu-test.sh
# To run a single test:
$ bash util/run-gnu-test.sh tests/touch/not-owner.sh # for example

Note that it relies on individual utilities (not the multicall binary).

To contribute to uutils, please see CONTRIBUTING.

This is an auto-generated table showing which binaries compile for each target-triple. Note that this does not indicate that they are fully implemented, or that the tests pass.

uutils is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details

GNU Coreutils is licensed under the GPL 3.0 or later.