The release of uutils coreutils 0.10.0 (Rust Coreutils) has been published, developing an alternative to the GNU Coreutils package written in Rust. The coreutils include over a hundred utilities, such as 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 running on Windows, Redox, and Fuchsia.
Rust Coreutils is used by default in the Ubuntu 25.10 release and partially in Ubuntu 26.04. Rust Coreutils is also used in 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 utility sets, as well as the sed and login programs.
In the new version of Rust Coreutils:
- The compatibility level with the reference test set of GNU Coreutils is now 93.48% (previously 90.58%). A total of 645 tests were successfully completed, which is 20 more than in the last version (625). 29 tests failed (down from 56), one test resulted in an error, and 15 tests were skipped (up from 8).
- Certain discrepancies with GNU Coreutils in the behavior of the utilities pr, nproc, date, numfmt, ls, du, install, od, truncate, fold, head/tail, sum, and stat have been resolved.
- Work continues on enhancing security to prevent vulnerabilities caused by race conditions, which may allow data to be altered between the validation of information and the execution of operations on it, for example, replacing a file with a symbolic link during the interval between verification and operation execution. In the context of using the utilities cp, chmod, and mv in system scripts run with root privileges, such vulnerabilities allow for the copying or overwriting of arbitrary files. The protection of the utilities touch, mkfifo, mkdir, mknod, mv, chroot, head, split, and chcon has been strengthened.
- Efforts have been made to eliminate crashes via the panic mechanism in the utilities shuf, printf, numfmt, fmt, pr, chroot, dircolors, install, ln, touch, stat, split, expand, more, kill, cp, du, rm, runcon, sort, chown/chgrp, dirname, expr, cksum, dd, truncate, hashsum.
- Performance optimization has been completed for the utilities cksum, sum, split, expand/unexpand, base*, tee, cat, cp, mv, expr, uniq, du.
- Support has been added for the build target wasm32-wasip2.
- The mv utility has an "--exchange" option for swapping two files or directories.
- The install utility includes the "--reflink" option and allows for the use of the "-C" and "--preserve-timestamps" options together.
- The rm utility has added the "--one-file-system" option.
- The cut utility now supports working with multibyte encodings when using non-UTF-8 locales.
- The OpenSSL backend has been implemented for quick checksum calculations.
Source: opennet.ru
