GNU coreutils

The GNU ls, cp, date, sed-adjacent tools, because macOS ships the BSD ones.

What it does

macOS inherits BSD userland, whose flags differ from GNU’s in ways that break any script written on Linux — date -d, sed -i without an argument, readlink -f, cp --reflink, stat -c, sort -V.

Homebrew installs GNU coreutils with a g prefix: gdate, gls, gcp, greadlink, gstat. Nothing system-level is replaced.

Putting them first

PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"

That shadows the BSD tools with unprefixed GNU names for your shell only.

Put the gnubin directory on PATH for interactive shells, not system-wide. macOS scripts and installers expect BSD behaviour and some of them break subtly when GNU tools answer instead.

Alternative to

Alternative	Type	Trade-off
The BSD tools already on macOS	Built in	Different flags, same jobs, nothing to install
uutils-coreutils	Open source	A Rust reimplementation of GNU coreutils, drop-in in most cases
busybox	Open source	One binary with small versions of everything, more common on embedded systems