# GNU coreutils 46 Hacker News commenters recommended GNU coreutils and 19 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** People recommend these standard command-line tools for text and files because they are stable, long-lived and work the same across scripts. The most common caveat is GNU-specific flags and behavior that do not carry over to other systems. ## Why people recommend it - Stable, battle-tested tools (4 comments): "It's one of the most stable pieces of Linux infrastructure. It's as solid as it gets." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47135528)) "Coreutuils are titanium rock stable tools that no one asked to rewrite." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46272205)) "GNU utils is battle tested, well reviewed, and STABLE." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266172)) - Long-running and reliable for decades (3 comments): "The C version has been around for ages, works well, and is GPL'ed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46267577)) "They do one thing and do it well very likely for another 50 years." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785355)) "the ones written in C are the most reliable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50067169)) - Composable tools for text processing (3 comments): "a system that just works across many domains, you don't need 100 different "apps" that each try to implement the features you get when chaining together the coreutils" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036448)) "Access to a well-established set of tools for operating on unstructured text" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49018512)) "Those are my go-to tools for quick-and-dirty log analysis." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48373453)) - Solid security track record (3 comments): "Historically, GNU coreutils has been pretty good with symbolic links and avoiding TOCTOU races." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49706095)) "I'd like to see literally any evidence that coreutils has a security problem" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47895121)) "this is exactly the class of bug that does not exist in GNU coreutils" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698499)) ## What people warn about - Inconsistent, GNU-specific behavior (3 comments): "The gnu runtime seems like a messy, badly specified hairball of hacky, inconsistent scripts to me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46265871)) "This isn't portable though, it's a GNU-specific 'smart' things." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49712467)) "inconsistent GNU halfassery" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50155162)) - Slow maintainers and resistance to change (2 comments): "These tools' maintainers seemed very inertial to me. So maybe this is why many (low importance, I assume) issues persists there for a long time." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123518)) "these tools are controlled by naysayers who want everything to stay as it was in the 80s" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47900984)) - Too many flags and jargon (2 comments): "GNU coreutils have man pages that are correct and list all the flags at least, but suffer from GNU jargonisms" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47027764)) "GNU coreutils have miriads of useless flags and missing one actually useful flag LoL." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46900622)) - Past security bugs and test failures (2 comments): "They tried that with coreutils and look what happened. More CVEs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515465)) "split --line-bytes has a user controlled heap buffer overflow" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47946148)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [uutils coreutils](https://hackerapproved.com/p/uutils-coreutils.md): 44 recommend - [BusyBox](https://hackerapproved.com/p/busybox.md): 27 recommend - [Microsoft Coreutils for Windows](https://hackerapproved.com/p/coreutils-for-windows.md): 10 recommend - [moreutils](https://hackerapproved.com/p/moreutils.md): 5 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "GNU coreutils", https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnu-coreutils/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).