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Microsoft makes Linux developers feel more at home in Windows with Coreutils release
Microsoft has announced Coreutils, a new Windows 11 feature that allows developers to run many popular Linux command line utilities natively on Windows from a single binary.
Revealed at this week’s Build 2026 developer conference in Seattle, Coreutils is about reducing what Microsoft terms the “cognitive load” faced by developers when moving between Windows and other platforms.
Currently, accessing the Linux command line utilities that are considered essential in many CI/CD development environments on Windows requires a kludge that involves either opening an emulation such as Git Bash, or a virtualized Windows Linux Subsystem (WSL) terminal.
Both are time-consuming and inefficient. As Microsoft’s announcement puts it: “Developers constantly move between platforms, but familiar commands don’t work consistently, forcing workarounds, lost speed and context switching.”
Coreutils removes the need for this back and forth, allowing developers to run most Linux commands straight from the Windows CMD command prompt, PowerShell, or Windows Terminal.
“Whether you’re moving between Linux, macOS, WSL, containers or cloud environments, the commands and workflows you’ve built over years just work in your Windows environment,” Microsoft said.
Most utilities, but not all
Installed as a single executable (via WinGet: install Microsoft.Coreutils), Coreutils for Windows itself is a Rust rewrite of the GNU uutils/coreutils project that provides commands that are universal across Linux distros.
Fundamental to making Coreutils efficient to manage is the fact that individual Linux commands run from a multi-call executable which maps via NTFS hardlinks pointing to each command. The advantage of this approach is that there’s only one binary to install, one binary to sign, and one binary to patch or update.
Microsoft lists 75 Linux utilities supported by Coreutils, including commonly-used commands such as ls, cp, find, grep, find, rm, du, hostname, and uptime.
However, some Coreutils commands clash with existing CMD or Powershell commands, or are otherwise not possible to execute; Microsoft provides a compatibility table listing conflicts. This means that some commands are not available, specifically: dir, expand, kill, more, timeout, and whoami.
There are also some commands omitted from Coreutils because a command relies on a POSIX Unix/Linux feature that Windows doesn’t implement in a compatible way; some examples are chmod, chown, id, stty, and chroot.
In other cases, the command will execute in one context, CMD, but not in PowerShell. Microsoft explained the complex order of precedence: “Whether the Coreutils version runs depends on the shell, the PATH order, and (for PowerShell) the alias table.”
As well as Coreutils, the Build 2026 developer conference also saw Microsoft announce WSL containers CLI and API to deploy Linux containers on Windows, a new framework for autonomous agents with open source governance tools, and Microsoft Scout, an AI agent designed to automate tasks in Microsoft 365.
This article originally appeared on InfoWorld.
