Core Utils

This started out as a repo for a failed project in rust that I abandoned. I don't like having a ton of stupid little failed repos in my github account because it looks messy and makes me feel gross. For a while, I've been reusing old repos for new projects. This repo stood as sort of a miscellaneous place where I would throw up code that wasn't really in a serious project. For instance, I had a little implementation of malloc in here, and some other random stuff.

Some of these random projects were re-implementations of some of the coreutils. Basically, all my other projects were a little bit too difficult and I was feeling a little burnt out, so I decided to do something easy and implement cat and head.

When I went to repurpose this repo once again, I felt bad deleting the code here. As such, I decided that I would implement even more of the coreutils and keep them here.

All the core utils here are based on the MacOS / FreeBSD implementations because I wrote them on a mac and I could easily cross reference the behavior. On the whole, I try my best to match the behavior of the original utils, however, on some of the more annoying ones (like touch), I simplify down to just the basic functionality so that I learn how the util works without getting bogged down in all the edge cases.

I also was humbled a ton throughout this project. I figured, oooh, this will be a fun and easy project to rip out over a couple hours. Well, it turns out that building the core utils requires you to know actually a lot about unix systems. I didn't know any of it, and tried not to use AI too too much so it ended up taking me quite a while.

As with all projects, the scope shifted around a ton while I built this.
I wanted to build all of the coreutils, then I realized that is way too ambitious. More importantly, a ton of the coreutils are repetative. For instance, mv and cp use do a lot of the same things and use the same c functions, so I wouldn't learn a ton out of building both. As such, I tried to have a fairly different set of coreutils to maximize my learning value.

TODO

• cat
• head
• pwd
• echo
• yes
• touch
• tee
• rm
• tail
• du
• mv
• ln
• chmod