Microsoft presented a port of a set of utilities Coreutils for the Windows platform. It includes several dozen utilities, including sort, cat, chmod, chown, cp, find, sleep, sort, tee, echo, uptime and ls. The toolkit allows you to directly use standard utilities available on Linux and macOS on Windows, without using the WSL layer. The goal of the project is to simplify the transition between Unix-like systems, WSL, containers and Windows, and provide a single set of commands, flags and methods that allow existing scripts to be transferred from other systems without rewriting. The code is written in Rust and PwerShell, and is distributed under the MIT license.
The implementation is based on the code of the uutils project (Rust Coreutils), which develops a variant of GNU Coreutils in the Rust language, as well as implementations of the find and grep in Rust. The utilities are collected in the form of one universal executable file “C:Program Filescoreutilscoreutils.exe”, individual commands to which are linked using hard links in NTFS.
Due to a conflict with existing standard Windows utilities or binding to specific capabilities, the utilities dd, dir, dircolors, shred, sync, uname, expand, kill, more, paste, timeout and whoami. Utilities based on POSIX concepts not supported in Windows are also excluded from the list: chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, groups, hostid, id, install, logname, mkfifo, mknod, nice, nohup, pathchk, pinky, runcon, stdbuf, stty, tty, users, who.
Of the limitations and features, the need to use NUL instead of /dev/null, lack of support is noted signals (SIGHUP, SIGPIPE, SIGUSR), the ability to create symbolic links only after enabling developer mode, the inaccessibility of some operations with access rights. When working with directories, both paths with the symbol “/” and those with “” are accepted.
At the same time, presented the first release of the terminal emulator Intelligent Terminal, which is a fork of Windows Terminal with an integrated AI agent. Connection of AI agents that support the ACP (Agent Client Protocol) protocol, such as gitHub Copilot, Claude, Codex and Gemini, is supported. The terminal code is written in C++ and Rust, and is open source