Microsoft Coreutils: Run Native UNIX Commands Like ls, cat, cp on Windows

Overview

Microsoft Coreutils is an officially maintained collection of UNIX‑style core utilities for Windows. It provides Rust‑based implementations of common commands such as ls, cat, cp, rm, etc., enabling scripts written for Linux, macOS, or WSL to run unchanged on Windows.

Upstream components

uutils/coreutils – Rust rewrite of GNU coreutils

uutils/findutils – Unix find implementation

uutils/grep – new grep implementation

Installation

Three supported methods:

WinGet (recommended): winget install Microsoft.Coreutils Download the latest release binary from the GitHub releases page.

Build from source:

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/coreutils.git
cd coreutils
cargo build --release

Verification

# Show version
ls --version

# Command help
cat --help

# List available commands (run the binary without arguments)

PowerShell integration

The installer registers the binaries with PSReadLine so that quoted arguments behave like in a POSIX shell.

# Wildcard expansion
echo *.txt

# Literal string
echo '*.txt'

PowerShell escape character remains the back‑tick ( `); Bash‑style backslash escapes are not valid.

# Bash‑style (invalid)
find . \( -foo -bar \)

# PowerShell syntax
find . `( -foo -bar `)

Because of PSNativeCommandPreserveBytePipe, Get-Command may show these utilities as built‑ins and Get-Help may not return the correct help text. Use cmd /c help or the utility’s own --help flag instead.

Compatibility notes

Symbols used in the compatibility list:

✅ – Included and works normally ⚠️ – Included but conflicts with a built‑in command (PATH order matters) 🛑 – Not included

Command   CMD   PowerShell   Notes
--------------------------------
cat       ✅    ⚠️          PATH priority issue
cp        ✅    ⚠️          Alias to Copy-Item
date      ⚠️    ⚠️          Conflicts with built‑in command
ls        ✅    ⚠️          Alias to Get-ChildItem
find      ✅    ✅          Rust version of DOS find
...

Windows‑specific differences

Line endings

Windows uses CRLF ( \r\n) while Linux uses LF ( \n). Pattern matching and byte counting can be affected.

# Pattern matching may fail
grep "pattern$" file.txt

# Byte count differs because of CRLF
wc -c file.txt

Convert files with dos2unix or an editor before processing.

No /dev/null

Use NUL as the null device.

# Linux/macOS
find . -name "*.log" > /dev/null

# Windows with Coreutils
find . -name "*.log" > NUL

Missing POSIX signals

Signals such as SIGHUP, SIGPIPE, SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2 are unavailable. Supported signals include:

✅ SIGINT (Ctrl+C)

✅ SIGTERM (future support)

✅ SIGKILL (future support)

Commands that rely on unavailable signals ( kill, nohup, timeout) are not provided.

Path separators

Both / and \ are accepted, but some utilities output backslashes. Using forward slashes yields more consistent results.

# Possible mixed output
ls               # output: file.txt
ls | sort        # output may contain \ separators

# Recommended usage
find . -name "*.txt"
find . -name "*.txt" | xargs cat > output.txt

File‑permission model

Windows uses ACLs instead of POSIX permission bits. Options that depend on -perm may not work; use generic filters.

# Not recommended
find . -perm 644

# Recommended
find . -type f -name "*.txt"

Symbolic‑link creation

✅ Reading existing symlinks requires no elevated rights.

⚠️ Creating new symlinks requires Developer Mode or an elevated terminal.

Commands not provided

Utilities that depend on POSIX concepts, conflict with existing Windows commands, or are impractical on Windows are omitted, e.g., dd (future), dircolors, shred, sync, uname, and permission‑management tools such as chmod, chown, etc.

Supported scenarios

Cross‑platform development where scripts run on Linux, macOS, WSL, and Windows.

DevOps pipelines that need a single command set for CI/CD agents on multiple OSes.

Migration of Linux shell scripts to Windows environments.

Learning UNIX commands on a Windows workstation.

Reference

- GitHub repository: https://github.com/microsoft/coreutils