What does the first u in uutils means?

[YousufSSyed]

Just curious.

[tertsdiepraam]

The name was decided on long before I even heard of the project, but I always understood it as "universal" (as in cross-platform). But it's not really an abbreviation, I suppose, because we never write "universal utils". So, I think you could apply any meaning you want. 😄 Maybe "you" or "updated" or "ultra" or "ubiquitous" or "united" or "unified" etc.

Or "ugly" if you strongly prefer the BSD style of utils over the GNU style 😉

The reason that I believe it's "universal" is because this was the original description in the README:

uutils is an attempt at writing universal (as in cross-platform) CLI utils in Rust. This repo is to aggregate the GNU coreutils rewrites.

Why?

Many GNU, linux and other utils are pretty awesome, and obviously
some effort
has been spent in the past to port them to windows. However those projects
are either old, abandonned, hosted on CVS, written in platform-specific C, etc.

Rust provides a good platform-agnostic way of writing systems utils that are easy
to compile anywhere, and this is as good a way as any to try and learn it.

Which was added in the second commit of the project all the way back in 2013.

[YousufSSyed]

Good answer, I'll wait for more.