Coreutils for Windows | Hacker News

Hacker News commenters debated how far Windows can realistically adopt Unix-like command-line behavior without breaking compatibility.

The thread focused on mismatched tool semantics, especially the confusion between find.exe and findstr.exe and whether coreutils should mimic Unix ls and friends on Windows.

People also argued over filesystem and text conventions like CRLF vs LF, backslashes vs forward slashes, drive letters, and UTF-16.

WSL and PowerShell came up as partial bridges, but the discussion showed there is no simple way to make Unix workflows behave identically on Windows.