uutils is an attempt at writing universal (as in cross-platform) CLI utilities in Rust. Many GNU, Linux and other utilities are useful, and obviously some effort has been spent in the past to port them to Windows. However, those projects are written in platform-specific C, a language considered unsafe compared to Rust, and have other issues. Rust provides a good, platform-agnostic way of writing systems utilities that are easy to compile anywhere, and this is as good a way as any to try and learn it. The requirements are to have Rust (cargo, rustc), GNU Make (required to build documentation), Sphinx (for documentation), and gzip (for installing documentation). uutils follows Rust's release channels and is tested against stable, beta and nightly. The current oldest supported version of the Rust compiler is 1.43.1. On both Windows and Redox, only the nightly version is tested currently.
Features
- There are currently two methods to build the uutils binaries, either Cargo or GNU Make
- Building uutils using Cargo is easy because the process is the same as for every other Rust program
- This command builds the most portable common core set of uutils into a multicall (BusyBox-type) binary
- Additional platform-specific uutils are often available
- Building using make is a simple process as well
- Testing can be done using either Cargo or make
Project Samples
