I believe that there are some things you just have to learn and memorize through repetition, and no shortcuts will help. One of those things is GNU Coreutils, a collection of standard shell commands that we all use every day. Do any of these commands look familiar to you? I'd bet most do:

  • cat, chmod, cp, echo, ls, mv, pwd, rm, sort, touch, and many more.

The coreutils collection/branding is 20+ years old, but the individual utitilies are 40+ years old. They have withstood the test of time and they are not going anywhere anytime soon. Just about every Linux and Unix-like distro provides them out of the box, including macOS (see Gotchas below), and Microsoft even provides a Coreutils for Windows... because they're that important and ubiquitous. Learn them.

Your development environment is a toolbox. Knowing which tools are available and what they're useful for will greatly improve your productivity and shell scripting intuition, just as it has for me. At the very least it’s worthwhile to know that these common utilities have a collective name (“coreutils”), official documentation is online, and everything is open source (also mirrored on GitHub) and actively maintained.

Additional Tools and the Free Software Foundation

Other indispensible GNU utilities that are not part of the coreutils package, yet are referenced throughout the official coreutils docs, are:

  • grep: search input files for patterns
  • sed: transform text on input streams
  • awk: (also known as gawk) select records from a file and operate on them

These are ~50 years old with equal ubiquity. You can't avoid them. Learn these, too. Mastering grep requires learning regular expressions.

All of the GNU utilities are created and maintained by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Consider joining and donating (non-profit) to the foundation to support GNU and other free software campaigns.

Gotchas

macOS, FreeBSD, and other BSD-based systems do not use GNU Coreutils. Instead, they provide BSD tools, that is mostly identical in provided commands, but may have some slight differences in behavior and CLI options. BSD tools are a re-implementation of most coreutils commands, so that they can be licensed under BSD rather than the GPL (GNU Public License).

TIP: On macOS, you can get the GNU coreutils via Homebrew:

brew install coreutils

GNU commands will be prefixed with g to avoid conflicting with the BSD tools, e.g. gcat, gtouch, etc.

Relevant Music

AI is cool, but this is another human cost that you must pay with your time instead of your tokens. So be it. ;-)