The GNU Core Utilities, often referred to as "coreutils," are a fundamental collection of software tools that provide the basic commands that are used to interact with a computer's operating system, manage files, and process text from the command-line. GNU coreutils provides a comprehensive set of command-line tools that perform a wide range of essential functions. These utilities are the building blocks for shell scripts and are used extensively in system administration, software development, and everyday computing tasks. GNU coreutils generally adheres to the POSIX standard, which ensures that there is reasonable compatibility across different operating systems, although many implementations include extensions and other enhancements that may introduce some variations.
While the coreutils include a wide range of commands that can be used in almost all scenarios, we focus on a few that are commonly used on a day-to-day basis to work with text files.