Ubuntu 26.10 moves cp, mv and rm to Rust coreutils

The commands underneath every deploy script you own are about to change implementation. Ubuntu 26.10 completes its move to Rust coreutils by switching cp, mv and rm over from the GNU versions — the last three holdouts, and the three that touch your files. Phoronix spotted the draft release notes ticking to 100% on September 16. Stable release is October 15.

What actually happened

Canonical has been shipping uutils, a Rust reimplementation of the GNU coreutils, as the default since Ubuntu 25.10. Most of the suite — ls, cat, chmod, du and the rest — went over then. But cp, mv and rm were pulled back to their GNU versions for 25.10 and 26.04 LTS after a set of TOCTOU (time-of-check to time-of-use) issues surfaced in the Rust implementations. Those are fixed upstream, so 26.10 finishes the job.

There is an escape hatch, and it is worth knowing before you need it: Ubuntu ships a coreutils-from-gnu package that restores the GNU binaries. It is in the archive for 25.10, 26.04 LTS and 26.10, so the fallback is a one-line install rather than a rebuild.

Worth noting what 26.10 is: an interim release, supported nine months, not an LTS. The LTS that most production fleets actually run is 26.04, which keeps GNU cp, mv and rm. So this is a preview of what lands in the next LTS, on a box you can test with.

Why a coreutils swap matters for your business

uutils aims to be a drop-in replacement, and for the ordinary cp -r and rm -rf in your Dockerfile it is. The risk is not the common path — it is the arguments nobody documented. Exit codes on partial failures, --preserve semantics across filesystems, how a trailing slash on a symlinked directory resolves, what happens when mv crosses a device boundary mid-operation. Shell scripts accumulate dependence on that behavior without anyone writing it down, and a build that has worked for four years is exactly where that dependence hides.

The fix is cheap and the window is open. Spin a 26.10 beta container, run your CI pipeline and your deploy scripts against it, and watch for anything that fails silently rather than loudly. If something breaks, apt install coreutils-from-gnu buys you time to fix it properly instead of during an incident. Do this now, while 26.10 is optional — not in eighteen months when the next LTS makes it the default and you are debugging a release that used to work.

Sources: Phoronix, OMG! Ubuntu, Ubuntu package archive.