Rust Coreutils 0.12 Released With Fixes Sought By Ubuntu

Days after the recent release of GNU Coreutils 9.12, Rust Coreutils 0.12 was released overnight for advancing this alternative Rust-based implementation of these core utilities.

Rust Coreutils 0.12 development was focused on "compatibility fixes for our Ubuntu friends" to address remaining issues ahead of next month's Ubuntu Linux update. Ubuntu 26.10 achieves its 100% transition to Rust Coreutils with lingering issues now resolved that affected Ubuntu 25.10 and 26.04 LTS. The Rust Coreutils 0.12 release announcement reads:

"We are happy to announce the release of Rust Coreutils 0.12.0 - a release focused on compatibility fixes for our Ubuntu friends.

Ubuntu ships uutils coreutils as its default coreutils implementation, and this cycle was driven by what their users and maintainers reported: the bugs they asked us to prioritize are all fixed here, along with a long tail of smaller divergences from GNU. Few of these are glamorous, but they are exactly what breaks a script that has worked for twenty years."

Among the Ubuntu-driven fixes are for ensuring rm no longer segfaults on very deeply nested directories, data loss in parallel "install -D", du support for 32-bit architectures, fixing "cp -R" name collisions, and other bugs.

The Rust Coreutils 0.12 release also removed its last C dependency of expr, other security hardening improvements, and cross-platform compatibility improvements. There are also performance improvements for the likes of sort, du, and cp.

Rust Coreutils continues to be at around a 95% pass rate compared to the GNU Coreutils with its test suite.

Downloads and more details on the Rust Coreutils 0.12 release via GitHub.