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Access CoreUtils That Conflict With Unix Utilities

In another post about GNU CoreUtils I explained how to install and use some of the provided utilities. The utilities I referenced were seq and realpath which are novel on MacOS. There are other CoreUtils that would conflict with existing system utilities. To avoid the conflicts, those utilities are installed with g prefix.

A good example of this is mv and gmv. These are both utilities for moving files and largely behave the same. They are a few subtle differences though.

Here is the manpage for the built-in mv utility:

NAME
     mv – move files

SYNOPSIS
     mv [-f | -i | -n] [-hv] source target
     mv [-f | -i | -n] [-v] source ... directory

And here is the manpage for gmv:

NAME
       mv - move (rename) files

SYNOPSIS
       mv [OPTION]... [-T] SOURCE DEST
       mv [OPTION]... SOURCE... DIRECTORY
       mv [OPTION]... -t DIRECTORY SOURCE...

There are some different forms and flags available. gmv for instance supports a -t flag which specifies the target directory so that all other listed paths are treated as sources of the move. This makes gmv easier to use with xargs, for instance.

Look through fd '^g' /opt/homebrew/bin/ and you'll notice a bunch of them like gls, gln, ghead, gwhoami, gyes, etc. You can also look through all of them in the coreutils.json homebrew formula.