# moreutils

5 Hacker News commenters recommended moreutils and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** A free collection of small Unix command-line tools, such as vipe for editing pipe contents, that people keep in their regular installs.

## Why people recommend it

- Essential utilities for everyday shell work (2 comments): "These are absolute must haves, but I really wish parallel didn't collide with the super useful GNU/parallel." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50219511)) "Has been in my regular installs for years" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50219687))
- Small Unix tools for shell pipelines (2 comments): "An alternative to the paste commands is vipe (vi + pipe?) from moreutils which opens an $EDITOR that returns the contents once saved and closed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614653)) "Originally intended to be used in crontabs, it executes a command and only outputs its output if it fails." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149435))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [GNU coreutils](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnu-coreutils.md): 46 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

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "moreutils", https://hackerapproved.com/p/moreutils/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).