Microsoft Coreutils brings Unix/Linux influence to Windows' command prompt

Microsoft releases Coreutils for Windows, incorporating more than 75 Unix commands into its own platform. Coreutils is based on a reimplementation of GNU Coreutils. This reimplementation is already standard in modern Linux distros.

The preview software published on GitHub gives users a set of tools in the Windows command prompt and PowerShell. These tools are similar to what is already available on Linux, macOS and Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). With WSL, Windows runs a full Linux installation without virtualization software.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella presented Coreutils as an expression of love for Linux at his company's Build conference. The powerful search command grep (global regular expression print) is in the list of commands in Microsoft's Coreutils. Written in Rust, this software for Windows also includes the native DOS commands sort and find. Microsoft previously added well-known Linux commands such as curl and sudo to the command prompt in Windows, writes The Register.