Install uutils coreutils on Ubuntu 24.04

The uutils coreutils is an implementation of the GNU core utilities (coreutils) in the Rust programming language. The GNU core utilities are a set of file, shell, and text manipulation utilities that are fundamental to Unix and Unix-like operating systems. These utilities include commands like ls, cp, mv, rm, cat, and many others. This tutorial explains how to install uutils coreutils on Ubuntu 24.04.

Install coreutils

Get the latest coreutils version from its GitHub repository:

COREUTILS_VERSION=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/uutils/coreutils/releases/latest" | grep -Po '"tag_name": "\K[0-9.]+')

Download the tar.gz package from the releases page of the coreutils repository:

wget -qO coreutils.tar.gz https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/releases/latest/download/coreutils-$COREUTILS_VERSION-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Create temporary directory and extract files to it:

mkdir coreutils-temp

tar xf coreutils.tar.gz --strip-components=1 -C coreutils-temp

Move executable to /usr/local/bin:

sudo mv coreutils-temp/coreutils /usr/local/bin

Remove downloaded archive and temporary directory:

rm -rf coreutils.tar.gz coreutils-temp

Testing coreutils

The coreutils offers a single binary that invokes various utils. The first argument specifies the util to run, followed by its usual arguments. Example:

coreutils ls -l /usr

Uninstall coreutils

To completely remove coreutils, delete related file:

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/coreutils