Microsoft launches Coreutils for Windows at Build 2026

Microsoft has announced the release of Coreutils for Windows, a native set of Linux-style command-line utilities designed to streamline development workflows across different operating systems. The announcement was made at the company's Build 2026 developer conference.

The project is based on the open-source uutils project, a cross-platform rewrite of the GNU core utilities in the Rust programming language. It packages these utilities, along with findutils and grep, into a single multicall binary for Windows. The stated goal is to reduce friction for developers who work across Linux, macOS, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), containers, and Windows itself by allowing the same commands, flags, and pipelines to function consistently. This enables existing scripts and habits to carry over without modification, according to the company.

Coreutils for Windows includes many fundamental commands familiar to users of Unix-like systems, such as cat, cp, find, grep, ls, mv, pwd, rm, and sleep. When installed, the setup creates individual command executables, like ls.exe and cp.exe, that are hardlinks pointing to the main coreutils.exe binary. This approach allows Microsoft to maintain a...