util-linux

util-linux (formerly util-linux-ng) is a freely distributed and open source software project that provides advanced GNU/Linux users with a large collections of command-line utilities for handling partitions and disk drives, system information and administration, managing logging events, and much more.

What tools are included?

As mentioned, util-linux contains a large number of utilities, among which we can mention addpart, agetty, arch, blkid, blockdev, cal, cfdisk, chfn, chkdupexe, chrt, chsh, clock, col, colcrt, colrm, column, ctrlaltdel, cytune, delpart, dmesg, elvtune, fallocate, fdformat, fdisk, findfs, findmnt, flock, fsck, fsck.cramfs, fsck.minix, fsfreeze, fstab, fstrim, getopt, hexdump and hwclock.

In addition, the ionice, ipcmk, ipcrm, ipcs, isosize, kill, ldattach, line, logger, login, look, losetup, lsblk, lscpu, mcookie, mesg, mkfs, mkfs.bfs, mkfs.cramfs, mkfs.minix, mkswap, more, mount, mountpoint, namei, newgrp, nologin, partx, pg, pivot_root, prlimit[5], raw, readprofile, rename, renice, reset, rev, rtcwake, script, scriptreplay, setarch, setsid, setterm, sfdisk, su, swaplabel, swapoff, swapon, switch_root, tailf, taskset, tunelp (deprecated)[6], ul, umount, unshare, uuidd, uuidgen, vigr, vipw, whereis, wipefs and write are also included.

What tools are no longer included?

Please note that the ddate, fastboot, fasthalt, halt, initctl, ramsize, rdev, reboot, rootflags, shutdown, simpleinit and vidmode tools have been removed from util-linux since 2012. Please note that the ‘arch’ tool has been replaced with the ‘uname’ or ‘arch’ tools from the coreutils package, the ‘elvtune’ is obsolete since Linux kernel 2.6.9, and the ‘tunelp’ tool is deprecated.

Supported operating systems and availability

Despite the fact that it includes so many command-line utilities, the util-linux project is distributed as a single sources archive of approximately 4 MB in size. This package is an essential component of a GNU/Linux system and it is usually installed by default on any distribution of Linux, supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures.