Microsoft just dropped Linux's everyday command-line tools straight into Windows, with no virtual machine and no Linux subsystem in the way. The company announced Coreutils for Windows at its Build 2026 developer conference, and it makes commands like ls, cp, grep, and rm run as plain Windows programs. The point is simple. If you move between Linux, macOS, Windows, and WSL all day, many familiar commands, flags, and pipelines can now carry over with fewer script changes, subject to Windows-specific caveats.
It is built on uutils, an open-source rewrite of the classic GNU coreutils tools in Rust, a programming language Microsoft favors for memory safety. Microsoft maintains the package, which bundles uutils/coreutils, findutils, and a GNU-compatible version of grep into one package you can install today, though Microsoft labels it a preview.
Install it with one line
You grab it through WinGet, the built-in Windows package installer, with winget install Microsoft.Coreutils. That gets you tools Linux users reach for constantly, including cat, cp, find, grep, hostname, ls, mv, pwd, rm, sleep, tee, and uptime.
There is a neat trick under the hood. Instead of one program file per command, everything lives in a single coreutils.exe. During setup, Windows creates an NTFS hardlink for each command, so ls.exe, cp.exe, and the rest all point back to that one file in C:\Program Files\coreutils.
When you type a command, Windows loads the shared binary, which then reads the name you used and runs the matching tool.
The catch
Many Linux command names collide with ones that Command Prompt and PowerShell already use. So whether you actually get the coreutils version depends on your shell, the order of folders in your PATH, and PowerShell's alias table, which needs PowerShell 7.4 or newer. Microsoft published a compatibility table to spell out which one wins where. A few tools, including dir, more, expand, and whoami, were left out for the same reason.
Some favorites are missing entirely. Commands that lean on POSIX features Windows lacks, like chmod, chown, chroot, nohup, tty, and who, did not make the cut. Neither did kill or timeout, because Windows has no POSIX signals, though Microsoft says signal support could come later.
And it warns that some commands may behave a little differently from their Linux versions because of line endings, file permissions, and POSIX gaps.
