Steve Ballmer’s darkest fear has come to pass: Linux has worked itself into the deepest innards of Microsoft Windows itself. At the company’s annual Build developer conference this week, Microsoft released coreutils, a Rust-built multi-call binary file for Windows that serves over 75 Unix commands directly in the Windows CMD and PowerShell command lines – including favorites such as cat, ls, grep, and head. They join Linux favorites curl and sudo which were earlier added to the Microsoft command lines. “Grep in full glory is now available for full Windows access,” enthused Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella yesterday during his Build keynote. Grep (Global Regular Expression Print) provides a way to search through all the files in a given space – it’s essential for searching through gargantuan log files for instance. It is one of the many commands memorized by the daily Linux user.
Behold! Grep on Windows CMD
Microsoft’s stated motivation in evoking Linux powers is an effort to standardize user commands across the multiverse of platforms it supports so that developer scripts work the same way across containers, PowerShell, Macs, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and the DOS-era CMD command line. Unix was built on the philosophy of small programs that can be easily piped together to build larger workflows, so that, say, the output of grep can be combined with other material through the cat (concatenate) command. As a result, developers, admins, and now AI agents write scripts that incorporate these commands.
