GNU coreutils can be built as a single binary with ./configure --enable-single-binary. One can install this variant on Fedora for example with the coreutils-single package, and this is used in some container images.
It's also worth mentioning a recent improvement we made (in coreutils 8.28) to the operation of the `tail | grep` example in the article. tail now notices if the pipe goes away, so one could wait for something to appear in a log, like:
tail -f /log/file | grep -q match
then_do_something
The vi vs emacs thing permeates a lot of tools.
I find it useful to map all tools to be consistent with one or the other.
Personally I use vi. Unfortunately setting vi mode for readline has a few caveats, but I was able to work around all of them with the settings in:
One might be wondering why 'test' and '[' are separate binaries at all.
This is to give maximum flexibility wrt copying binaries etc.
Note one can build coreutils like busybox as a single binary,
by just `./configure --enable-single-binary` at build time.
This is already available as an option on Fedora at least through
the coreutils-single (1.2MB) package.
Some extra notes...
Accurate (cgroup aware) nproc is important, as detailed in: https://danluu.com/cgroup-throttling/
The new base58 encoding performs well being around 500 times faster than arbitrary int implementation internal to cpython 3.13 for example