Anthropic · Copilot · Microsoft · The Register
Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows
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Coreutils serves over 75 Unix commands in Windows and PowerShell command lines.
Key facts
- For Office 365, Microsoft introduced a new set of prefabricated OpenClaw-based agents, called AutoPilots, that inherit the developer’s environment
- You can download and install Coreutils, which is only about 4.6MB, through CMD WinGet (“winget install Microsoft
- Microsoft’s stated motivation in evoking Linux powers is an effort to standardize user commands across the multiverse of platforms it supports so that developer scripts work the same way
- Coreutils serves over 75 Unix commands in Windows and PowerShell command lines
Summary
Steve Ballmer’s darkest fear has come to pass: Linux has worked itself into the deepest innards of Microsoft Windows itself. At the company’s annual Build developer conference this week, Microsoft released coreutils, a Rust-built multi-call binary file for Windows that serves over 75 Unix commands directly in the Windows CMD and PowerShell command lines, including favorites such as cat, ls, grep, and head. Microsoft’s stated motivation in evoking Linux powers is an effort to standardize user commands across the multiverse of platforms it supports so that developer scripts work the same way across containers, PowerShell, Macs, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and the DOS-era CMD command line. Unix was built on the philosophy of small programs that can be easily piped together to build larger workflows, so that, say, the output of grep can be combined with other material through the cat (concatenate) command.