Announcing Built-in Core Utilities for Windows
When I started Task back in 2017, one of my biggest goals was to build a task runner that would work well on all major platforms, including Windows. At the time, I was using Windows as my main platform, and it caught my attention how much of a pain it was to get a working version of Make on Windows, for example.
The very beginning
The very first versions, which looked very prototyp-ish, already supported Windows, but it was falling back to Command Prompt (cmd.exe) to run commands if bash wasn't available in the system. That didn't mean you couldn't run Bash commands on Windows necessarily, because if you used Task inside Git Bash, it would expose bash.exe into your $PATH, which made possible for Task to use it. Outside of it, you would be out of luck, though, because running on Command Prompt meant that the commands wouldn't be really compatible.
Adopting a shell interpreter
I didn't take too much time to discover that there was a shell interpreter for Go that was very solid, and I quickly adopted it to ensure we would be able to run commands with consistency across all platforms. It was fun because once adopted, I had the opportunity to make some contributions to make it more stable, which I'm sure the author appreciated.
The lack of core utilities
There was one important thing missing, though. If you needed to use any core utilities on Windows, like copying files with cp, moving with mv, creating a directory with mkdir -p, that likely would just fail 💥. There were workarounds, of course. You could run task inside Git Bash which exposed core utils in $PATH for you, or you could install these core utils manually (there are a good number of alternative implementations available for download).
That was still far from ideal, though. One of my biggest goals with Task is that it should "just work", even on Windows. Requiring additional setup to make things work is exactly what I wanted to avoid.
They finally arrive!
And here we are, in 2025, 8 years after the initial release. We might be late, but I'm happy nonetheless. From now on, the following core utilities will be available on Windows. This is the start. We want to add more with time.
base64catchmodcpfindgziplsmkdirmktempmvrmshasumtartouchxargs
How we made this possible
This was made possible via a collaboration with the maintainers of other Go projects.
u-root/u-root
We are using the core utilities implementations in Go from the u-root project. It wasn't as simple as it sounds because they have originally implemented every core util as a standalone main package, which means we couldn't just import and use them as libraries. We had some discussion and we agreed on a common interface and base implementation. Then, I refactored one-by-one of the core utils in the list above. This is the reason we don't have all of them: there are too many! But the good news is that we can refactor more with time and include them in Task.
mvdan/sh
The other collaboration was with the maintainer of the shell interpreter. He agreed on having an official middleware to expose these core utilities. This means that other projects that use the shell interpreter can also benefit from this work, and as more utilities are included, those projects will benefit as well.
Can I choose whether to use them or not?
Yes. We added a new environment variable called TASK_CORE_UTILS to control if the Go implementations are used or not. By default, this is true on Windows and false on other platforms. You can override it like this:
# Enable, even on non-Windows platforms
env TASK_CORE_UTILS=1 task ...
# Disable, even on Windows
env TASK_CORE_UTILS=0 task ...We'll consider making this enabled by default on all platforms in the future. In the meantime, we're still using the system core utils on non-Windows platforms to avoid regressions as the Go implementations may not be 100% compatible with the system ones.
Feedback
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