Not Kidding! Microsoft Just Brought Linux Commands to Windows Officially
Not Kidding! Microsoft Just Brought Linux Commands to Windows Officially
https://itsfoss.com/news/windows-coreutils/
Publish Date: 2026-06-03 11:31:00
Source Domain: itsfoss.com
Microsoft just shipped coreutils for Windows. Yes, you read that right.
ls. grep. cat. cp. find. The same commands that have powered Unix and Linux systems for over 50 years are now available natively on Windows, maintained by Microsoft itself.
In case you are not already familiar, GNU coreutils are the foundational utilities that every Linux and macOS system relies on for basic file operations, text processing, and shell scripting. They are the foundation of Unix computing. Tens of millions of scripts, pipelines, and workflows depend on them every day.
And now Microsoft is shipping and maintaining a build of them for Windows.
This is not WSL. You do not need a Linux subsystem running in the background. These “Linux commands” run natively on Windows, with the exact same flags and behavior as on Linux.
Microsoft’s ultimate goal seems to make moving between Linux, macOS, WSL, containers, and Windows completely frictionless. Write a script once. Run it anywhere.
The Rust-based Windows coreutils is a work in progress
The package bundles uutils/coreutils (a modern Rust rewrite of GNU coreutils), findutils, and grep into a single multi-call binary. Every command supports standard flags. Same commands, same pipelines, no translation needed.
The project is still in preview and there are only a handful of commands. Since some commands have the same name in Linux and Windows, there is a possibility of conflict. Some don’t fit in Windows environment.
Commands like dir, expand, more, paste, whoami conflict too directly with existing Windows built-ins. kill and timeout are unavailable due to Windows lacking POSIX signals. dd, dircolors, shred, sync, and uname were dropped as not useful on Windows. A longer list of POSIX-only commands like chmod, chown, chroot, mkfifo, id, who, and others are simply not applicable to the Windows environment. Who is surprised? Not me.
So, what commands are available as part of Windows coreutils then? The official…
