For years, I never gave GNU coreutils much thought. They’re the standard Linux commands like ls, cp, mv, cat, sort, and wc that come with almost every Linux system. They just work, so I always assumed there wasn’t much to improve.
That changed a few months ago when I was analyzing a huge Apache log file on one of my TecMint servers. I was running sort and wc on several gigabytes of data, and some commands took longer than I expected. That made me wonder if there was a faster or more modern alternative.
While looking around, I came across uutils-coreutils, an open-source project that reimplements GNU coreutils in Rust. It provides nearly all of the familiar commands you already use every day, but they’re written in Rust instead of C. Besides Rust’s built-in memory safety, some commands can also perform better when working with large files.