The release of the uutils coreutils 0.6.0 (Rust Coreutils) project has been published, developing an analog of the GNU Coreutils package, written in Rust. Coreutils includes more than a hundred utilities, including sort, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln, and ls. The project's goal is to create a cross-platform alternative implementation of Coreutils, capable of working on Windows, Redox, and Fuchsia platforms, among others.
Rust Coreutils is enabled by default in the release of Ubuntu 25.10 and is used in the AerynOS (Serpent OS) and Apertis (developed by Collabora) distributions. Unlike GNU Coreutils, the Rust implementation is distributed under the permissive MIT license instead of the copyleft GPL license. Additionally, the same team of developers is working on Rust implementations of the util-linux, diffutils, findutils, procps, and acl utilities, as well as the sed and login programs.
In the new version of Rust Coreutils:
- A compatibility level with the reference test suite of GNU Coreutils has been achieved—96.28% (up from 87.75%). A total of 622 tests were successfully executed, which is 56 more than in the previous version (566). 16 tests (previously 55) failed, and 7 tests (previously 23) were skipped. The most significant increase in compatibility was noted for the utilities sort, ls, date, cksum, and tail.
- Code that used the keyword 'unsafe' has been removed from date, sort, locale.rs, and other utilities.
- Calls to the libc standard library have been replaced with equivalent safe calls provided by the nix package.
- Error handling has been improved, and crashes while writing to /dev/full have been eliminated.
- Localization of month and day names, considering ICU, has been implemented in the date utility. Hour and calendar formatting now accounts for locale.
- In the sort utility, sorting of numbers with thousand separators has been provided, and handling of parameters +POS/-POS has been implemented.
- Support for the locale property 'collation' has been added to the join utility, allowing for comparisons that consider the meaning of characters (e.g., accent marks may be ignored in comparisons).
- Performance optimization has been conducted for the base32, base64, basenc, and df utilities.
- In the uniq utility, memory consumption has been reduced when working without case sensitivity.
- The shuf utility's numerical output has been optimized, and the option '--random-seed' has been added.
- In tsort, loading all input data into memory has been eliminated.
- A flag '--debug' has been added to the tail utility.
- In the chmod utility, recursive execution issues have been resolved, and the option '--preserve-root' has been added.
- Security has been enhanced for directory content traversal on Unix-like systems.
- Support for the SMACK mandatory access control mechanism has been added to the ls, id, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod utilities.
- The continuous integration system now includes build checks on 64-bit RISC-V systems using the musl library.
- Improved functionality in Windows using Cygwin.
- The capabilities of various utilities have been expanded, issues have been resolved, and missing options have been added for utilities like arch, base64, basename, cat, chgrp, chmod, chroot, cksum, comm, cp, csplit, date, dd, df, dir, dirname, du, echo, env, expand, expr, fmt, fold, groups, hashsum, head, hostid, id, install, join, kill, ln, logname, ls, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, mktemp, more, mv, nice, nl, nohup, nproc, numfmt, pr, printenv, printf, ptx, readlink, rm, rmdir, runcon, seq, shred, shuf, sort, split, stat, stdbuf, stty, sync, tac, tail, tee, test, timeout, touch, truncate, tsort, uname, unexpand, uniq, uptime, users, wc, yes, ucore, uucore, uudoc.
Source: opennet.ru
