Ubuntu's 'Rust-ification' Hits New Milestone: Coreutils Migration is Complete
"Ubuntu has managed to do away with GNU Core Utilities in its default stack," reports the blog It's FOSS. The last three utilities — cp, mv and rm — have been moved to versions from the uutils project (which reimplements utilities in Rust). Everything else, from ls and cat to chmod and du, made that jump in earlier releases... Canonical started "oxidizing" Ubuntu last year, and Ubuntu 25.10…
Ubuntu has successfully transitioned from using GNU Core Utilities to the uutils project's version of these utilities. The last three utilities - cp, mv, and rm - are now in versions from uutils, while the rest, including ls, cat, chmod, and du, migrated earlier. Canonical began this process last year, with Ubuntu 25.10 being the first release to use uutils coreutils as the default.
The plan slowed down in Ubuntu 26.04 due to certain TOCTOU issues, but these were addressed during a security audit commissioned by Canonical. Over 113 issues were raised, 44 of which were assigned CVEs. Despite some temporary setbacks, such as uutils cp causing problems with live image builds, the migration is now complete. While the user interface remains largely unchanged, users should note that uutils coreutils is designed to be a drop-in replacement for GNU tools, with any differences treated as bugs. Those who prefer the GNU version can still install the coreutils-from-gnu package.
Written by urgent.news from Slashdot's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
