List of GNU packages

This list of GNU packages lists notable software packages developed for or maintained by the Free Software Foundation as part of the GNU Project.

Summarising the situation in 2013, Richard Stallman identified nine aspects which generally apply to being a GNU package, but he noted that exceptions and flexibility are possible when there are good reasons:

There is no official "base system" of the GNU operating system. GNU was designed to be a replacement for Unix operating systems of the 1980s and used the POSIX standards as a guide, but either definition would give a much larger "base system". The following list is instead a small set of GNU packages which seem closer to being "core" packages than being in any of the further down sections. Inclusions (such as plotutils) and exclusions (such as the C standard library) are of course debatable.

textutils: cat, cksum, head, tail, md5sum, nl, od, pr, tsort, join, wc, tac, paste, etc.
shellutils: basename, chroot, date, dirname, echo, env, groups, hostname, nice, nohup, printf, sleep, etc.

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