Latest Trends in Microsoft’s Official Linux Command Set Installable with WinGet (Updated June 2026)

In June 2026, Microsoft officially released Coreutils for Windows.

winget install Microsoft.Coreutils

The Microsoft.Coreutils package installed with this command is an official Microsoft project that enables UNIX-style commands commonly used on Linux and macOS—such as ls, cp, rm, and cat—to run natively on Windows.

This article summarizes the project overview, supported commands, limitations, and differences from WSL and PowerShell.

Overview

Microsoft.Coreutils is a set of command-line tools for Windows maintained by Microsoft.

Internally, it is built on:

• uutils/coreutils
• findutils
• grep

and implemented in Rust.

Microsoft describes the project’s goal as:

reducing friction for developers who move between Linux, macOS, WSL, containers, and Windows

Installation

It can be installed easily from WinGet.

winget install Microsoft.Coreutils

WinGet is the package manager built into Windows, and it can automatically download and install the specified package.

After installation, it can be used as ordinary commands.

ls
cat file.txt
grep keyword log.txt
cp source.txt backup.txt

Main Available Commands

Representative commands are as follows.

Category	Example Commands
File listing	ls
File copy	cp
File move	mv
File deletion	rm
Display contents	cat
Working directory	pwd
Create directory	mkdir
Sleep	sleep
Pipe processing	tee
Search	grep, find

If you are a Linux user, you can use familiar commands as they are.

PowerShell Collision Issues

This is the biggest point of caution!

PowerShell already has aliases and built-in commands with the same names.

Examples:

Command	Issue
ls	Conflicts with a PowerShell alias
cp	Conflicts with Copy-Item
cat	Conflicts with Get-Content
rm	Conflicts with Remove-Item
pwd	Conflicts with Get-Location

Therefore, even if you run:

ls

it does not necessarily invoke the Coreutils version.

Microsoft recommends using PowerShell 7.4 or later.

Windows-Specific Limitations

Although it aims for Linux compatibility, there are limitations due to Windows internals.

1. No POSIX Signals

Linux’s mechanisms for:

kill
SIGTERM
SIGKILL

do not exist on Windows.

Therefore,

kill
timeout

are not provided at this time.

2. No /dev/null

Linux:

grep error log.txt > /dev/null

Windows:

grep error log.txt > NUL

will be used instead.

3. Differences Between ACL and POSIX Permissions

Windows uses ACL-based permission management.

Therefore, commands such as:

chmod
chown
chgrp

are not provided.

---

4. Creating Symbolic Links

Reading is possible, but creating new ones requires:

• Developer Mode
• Administrator privileges

Main Commands Not Provided

Microsoft intentionally excludes some commands.

Those that conflict with Windows

• dir
• more
• paste
• whoami
• expand

Those with strong POSIX dependencies

• chmod
• chown
• chgrp
• chroot
• nohup
• stty
• tty
• who

Not yet implemented at this time

• kill
• timeout
• dd

Differences from WSL

A common comparison is with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

Item	Microsoft.Coreutils	WSL
Installation cost	Very low	Requires setting up a Linux environment
Startup speed	Native	Has a virtualized layer
Linux compatibility	Partial	Very high
Bash environment	None	Available
apt usage	Not possible	Possible
Shell script compatibility	Limited	High

WSL is “Linux itself,” whereas Coreutils is “a toolset for using Linux-style commands on Windows.”