1<html><head><title>toybox news</title> 2<!--#include file="header.html" --> 3 4<p>Toybox combines common Linux command line utilities together 5into a single BSD-licensed executable that's simple, small, fast, 6reasonably standards-compliant, and powerful enough to turn Android into 7a development environment. See the links on the left for details.</p> 8 9<h2>News</h2> 10 11<a name="08-02-2019" /><a href="#08-02-2019"><hr><h2><b>February 8, 2019</b></h2></a> 12<blockquote> 13<p>"Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified 14Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and 15in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have 16been left blank to save on printing costs."</p> 17<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 18</blockquote> 19 20<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.0</a> 21(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.0>git commit</a>) 22is out.</p> 23 24<p>Toybox now builds on MacOS and FreeBSD, thanks to the efforts of Elliott 25Hughes and Ed Maste respectively. Use the "make macos_defconfig" and "make 26freebsd_defconfig" targets to enable the set of commands that compile on 27each so far.</p> 28 29<p><u>New commands</u>: Added an <b>sntp</b> client/server (RFC 4330 Simple Network Time 30Protocol, a compatible subset of ntp). The <b>test</b> command was rewritten 31and promoted out of pending.</p> 32 33<p><u>New options</u>: <b>grep</b> now has --color, supports embedded NUL bytes in its input, 34recognizes binary files, and passes all of grep.test (in case you 35needed the middle numerical field of -bB, etc). 36Josh Gao added ipv6 and UDP support to <b>netcat</b>. 37Volodymyr Medvid reported that install -d doesn't honor -o or -g. 38Elliott Hughes did a lot of work to support hermetic Android/AOSP builds: 39<b>mkdir</b> accepts both --parent and --parents as synonyms for -p, <b>touch</b> ignores -f, 40<b>basename</b> added -s to remove a trailing suffix, <b>dirname</b> now supports multiple 41arguments, <b>cmp</b> accepts --quiet and --silent as synonyms for -s, <b>hostname</b> 42added -sfd, <b>head</b> added --bytes as a synonym for -c and --lines as a synonym 43for -n, <b>mktemp</b> added -t and fixed -u, <b>sed</b> added -z and -iEXT to keep backup files, 44<b>md5sum</b> and sha1sum added --status and --check as synonyms -s and -c, 45<b>readlink</b> added --canonicalize as a synonym for -f, <b>sort</b> grew -V, 46<b>patch</b> added -s its synonym --quiet, <b>stat</b> added --format as 47a synonym for -c, <b>xargs</b> added -p -t -r, 48Eduardas Meile asked 49that <b>umount</b> ignore -c. Reverend Homer added a small optimization to file.c, 50and Elliott taught <b>file</b> to recognize riscv ELF binaries. Peter Collingbourne 51taught <b>ls</b> -t to use the nanoseconds field. 52<b>patch</b> has better support for patching a file with a tab in the name.</p> 53 54<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 55<b>cp</b> --preserve was segfaulting when you didn't specify _what_ to 56preserve (it now correctly defaults to "mot") and didn't get the permissions 57right when copying a symlink's contents as a regular file, 58<b>sort</b> -x didn't work when 59attached to a key, <b>host</b> didn't allocate a big enough buffer for worst 60case ipv6 address size, <b>sed</b> needed a ; between b and } when other 61implementations don't (we're already well past what posix says but a script 62out in the field broke...), 63and several fixes to <b>hostname</b> in a container, <b>ps</b>/<b>top</b> were 64misreading the VIRT and SHM fields.</p> 65 66<p><u>Pending</u>: Gavin Howard updated <b>bc</b> and added more tests, 67Marius Adaskevicius pointed out <b>mdev</b> -s should follow symlinks, 68Yangchun Fu reported a <b>dhcp</b> checksum bug, <b>modprobe</b> needed errno reset 69to avoid reporting spurious errors in verbose mode and no longer 70exits with status 1 if it can't find /etc/modprobe.conf, the <b>more</b> command 71wasn't always flushing stdout when it exited.</p> 72 73<p><u>Build</u>: 74<b>chrt</b> no longer #warns about the musl sched_get_priority_min() bug, but 75instead works around it. 76We were mixing setjmp/siglongjmp (harmless in some contexts but it kind 77of annoyed FreeBSD), and 78make install_airlock now adds sha256sum (because the Linux 4.20 build now 79needs that for the s390x target).</p> 80 81<p><u>Coding style</u>: 82Rob converted the rest of the option GLOBALS() to the new single letter 83coding style, and the new FLAG(x) macro is a slightly tidier way to say 84"toys.optflags&FLAG_x". 85Removed CFG_SORT_BIG (the sort command always 86has the full functionality now. The general future direction or toybox 87is to either have a command or not have it; multiple versions of the 88same command aren't worth the complexity in testing, documentation, 89or system adminstration).</p> 90 91<p><u>Library code</u>: 92The mkflags plumbing can now support arbitrary punctuation as option 93names via an escape syntax (because mkfs.vfat specifies an offset with -@), 94and lib/args.c now only sets FLAGS_NODASH when the first argument 95didn't have a dash (allowing "ps ax" and "ps -ax" to behave differently).</p> 96 97<p>Added an xrename() function, 98xchdir() has better error reporting, xconnect()/xbind() had their 99implementations merged, xsendto() moved from ping to lib, xpoll() now 100measures elapsed time and only waits for the remaining period when restarted, 101and Eduardas Meile converted several error_exit() to error_exit_raw() (because 102yocto 2.6 buils with -Werror=format-security by default).</p> 103 104<p>There's a scripts/portability.sh now which lets the build use gsed and gmake 105(when available) in more places to avoid broken host versions on MacOS and FreeBSD. 106The syntax of the "noreturn" attribute 107changed slightly, some calls to strnstr() were replaced with strcasestr(), 108we work around MacOS' lack of features.h, portability.h can now do Apple's 109endianness macros, and so on.</p> 110 111<p>Following the <a href=faq.html#support_horizon>seven year rule</a> 112Elliott removed support or glibc 2.10, and also 113reformatted a lot of --help text for consistency (removing trailing 114periods and such).</p> 115 116<p><u>Test suite</u>: 117The test suite now has its own version of "pending", specifically "make tests" 118skips test files without the executable bit set (unless you export $TEST_ALL). 119This eliminates "expected failures" (I.E. files with unresolved todo items) 120from the global regression test. Additional tests can be added to the global 121regression test with chmod +x as the todo items they document get resolved.</p> 122 123<p>Several places the test suite got fluffed out, including guards to skip 124root-only tests when run as a normal user. The testcmd function prints the 125short name instead of the full path to the command. 126The tests for the test command 127("test.test") no longer test the shell builtin but correctly test the 128toybox command. (Now say that ten times fast.)</p> 129 130<p>Bash version skew required replacing "continue" with "return" to stop 131tests early in bash 4.4 (for VERBOSE=fail).</p> 132 133 134<a name="31-10-2018" /><a href="#31-10-2018"><hr><h2><b>October 31, 2018</b></h2></a> 135<blockquote><p> 136"In the beginning the Universe was created. 137This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 138</p> 139</blockquote> 140 141<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.8.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.8</a> 142(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.8>git commit</a>) 143is out (a month late).</p> 144 145<p>Toybox <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2018-October/009769.html>now builds</a> with the Android NDK (r18 release), almost out of the box. 146You have to add an "llvm-cc" symlink to "clang", then use CROSS_COMPILE=llvm- 147with the appropriate $PATH (or absolute path in CROSS_COMPILE) for the 148target you want to build for. (To run it on a non-android host, you probably 149want "LDFLAGS=--static" too.)</p> 150 151<p><u>New commands</u>: <b>i2cdetect</b>, <b>i2cdump</b>, <b>i2cget</b>, and <b>i2cset</b> 152courtesy of Elliott/Android. The <b>watch</b> command got a complete (tty-aware) 153rewrite, and was promoted out of pending. The <b>prlimit</b> command is back 154(a configuration bug was always disabling it), and <b>ascii</b> now defaults y 155in defconfig (an oversight).</p> 156 157<p><u>New options</u>: 158The <b>ifconfig</b> command added -S (short view) giving one line of 159information per interface, in "name ipv4/mask macaddr [ipv6/mask@type...]" 160format. <b>grep</b> grew binary file detection, with -I and -a options to 161ignore them or force treating them as ascii (really utf8). 162Zach Van Rijn asked for <b>find -empty</b>. 163In the <b>file</b> command, Elliott improved java 164.class support and added .wav, .bmp, and android .dex. 165Elliott also added "getconf -a" and a lot of missing getconf symbols the 166AOSP build uses, including support for pathconf(3) symbols requiring two 167arguments. This means getconf's arguments work more like ubuntu's 168now (one or two arguments, not iterating through the supplied list and 169processing each like last release), and -l grew section identifiers (so 170the "getconf -l" output is no longer a directly consumable list of symbols 171it takes). 172Command line options specifying durations (like top -d or ping -i) can 173now use fractions and units, like "1.5" and ".1m". See "toybox --help" for 174details. 175Toybox now dereferences one layer of symlinks if it doesn't recognize the 176name it's called under (so if you "ln -s $(which sleep) blah" and then 177"./blah 30", it should figure out you mean sleep 30).</p> 178 179<p><u>Pending</u>: 180Gavin Howard contributed a large new <b>bc</b> implementation to pending, 181which covers everything the kernel build needs (and more) but is going to 182take a while to review. 183In <b>diff</b> the android guys added --color and timestamps on the 184+++/--- lines. In <b>mdev</b> Faustas Azuolas Bagdonas added support 185for mdev.conf's fourth field. Reverend Homer suggested an error message 186improvement in <b>wget</b>, Kevin Spiteri did a cleanup pass on test.c, 187and there was a cleanup pass on the passwd command.</p> 188 189<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 190Elliott responded to a bug in <b>getconf</b>'s sed-based header generation by 191replacing it with a more conventional array of #defined symbols, with #ifdefs 192for missing symbols on the three libc implementations (glibc, bionic, musl) 193we've tested so far. (This requires portability.h work to add new supported 194build environments, but at least it works on bionic now.) 195The <b>file</b> command now fails gracefully when reading pathologically 196broken ELF files (the tests for integer overflow missed one), and 197<b>date</b> no longer shows a meaningless errno when it can't parse the 198date format. 199Several fixes in <b>ping</b> (-w and -W didn't work, -c kept sending packets 200while waiting for replies, and when no reply packets were received the summary 201data was printed twice). 202Elliott fixed <b>wc</b> column widths (traditional reality doesn't match 203posix), fixed <b>modprobe</b>'s error handling (reported by Wen Xie), and 204also fixed the units on blockdev --blkraget (reported by Martijn Coenen). 205Several small fixes to the <b>stat</b> command's output (help text, quoting 206style, leading zeroes, switch -f from %t to %T), <b>oneit</b> no longer 207reboots the system when it's not called as PID 1. 208Last release's commit letting $STRIP be redefined had a typo. 209Nick Kralevich added an istty() check before calling TIOCGWINSZ (which 210triggered Android's strict ioctl filtering on non-filesystem fifos). 211An unstripped build (where the "strip" command fails for a given 212CROSS_COMPILE) will now overwrite the (read-only) output file instead of 213failing a rebuild. The dirtree plumbing no longer prints a "No" on front 214of the filename in error messages (such as "permission denied").</p> 215 216<p><u>Docmentation</u> 217Elliott updated the roadmap with Android AOSP status, towards turning that 218into a hermetic build (hopefully with an eventual self-hosting option, work 219is <a href=b33d37d6f735>already underway</a> on the airlock step). 220Rob added a little more context for LSB and described the move from Aboriginal 221Linux to mkroot. 222The <b>ps</b> help text changed: now "ps -o help" shows the fields and the normal 223--help is much more manageable. Ifconfig's --help text also got tidied up. 224Our LICENSE file has the SPDX identifier (0BSD) now, and the note about 225the kconfig/ subdirectory still having (build only, non-shipping) GPL code 226in it moved into the kconfig subdirectory.</p> 227 228<p><u>Coding style change:</u> 229GLOBALS() now uses the argument letter as the variable 230name for variables automatically set by command line arguments via lib/args.c, 231and no longer requires they be one per line. 232Removed use of the gcc 233\e extension in string constants, replacing it with \033.</p> 234 235<p><u>Library code:</u> 236lib/interestingtimes.c was renamed to lib/tty.c. 237The deflate code from toys/pending/compress.c moved to lib/deflate.c, 238which gunzip.c now uses when it's not configured to use zlib. (This reduces 239the bootstrap dependencies for the "airlock" step of a hermetic build.) 240The compression side remains a todo item. 241Added "%" to lib/args.c reading seconds (including fractions/units) into a 242long milliseconds argument. Redid xparsetime() to not need floating point, 243added xparsemillitime() for milliseconds common case, and 244parsetime() now treats leading garbage as an error instead of returning zero. 245The bufgetpwuid()/pufgetgrgid() functons can now handle more than 4k of group 246data. The set_terminal() function can now set serial speed, and microcom.c 247uses it. Added xsignal_flags(), and more consistently use xsignal() (which wraps 248sigaction()) instead of signal(). 249A new xgetrandom() function calls the new getrandom() system call, falling 250back to /dev/urandom on older kernel/libc (made to actually _work_ by 251Patrick Oppenlander).</p> 252 253<p><u>Build infrastructure:</u> 254Updated dependency detection so "make distclean defconfig toybox" now works 255all on the same command line. (This is nice when $CROSS_COMPILE changes). 256scripts/config2help.c no longer includes parts of lib/ and just copies what 257it needs into itself, improving build portability. 258The build now checks the specified cross compiler exists, hopefully providing 259a more informative error message when it doesn't. Similarly, when .config is 260missing the error message suggests running make defconfig.</p> 261 262<a name="23-06-2018" /><a href="#23-06-2018"><hr><h2><b>June 23, 2018</b></h2></a> 263<blockquote> 264<p>There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what 265the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be 266replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another 267theory which states that this has already happened.</p> 268<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 269</blockquote> 270 271<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.7.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.7</a> 272(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.7>git commit</a>) 273is out.</p> 274 275<p><u>New commands</u>: Rob Landley added <b>getconf</b>, Elliott Hughes added 276<b>uuidgen</b>, and <b>ping</b> and <b>fmt</b> were promoted out of pending.</p> 277 278<p><u>New options</u>: The <b>cp</b> command added the --parents option, 279<b>readlink</b> now has -m to show where a missing path would be, 280<b>netstat</b> got some updates (better nommu support, it can use /etc/services 281names, more command line options are bounds checked), 282Ng Zhi An added --getra and --setra (get/set readahead) to <b>blockdev</b>, 283Elliott Hughes added <b>xxd</b> -o and made <b>top</b> -d understand fractional 284sections (because the Linux Test Project uses that), and 285Minghui Liu added <b>watch</b> -b.</p> 286 287<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: Several fixes to <b>vmstat</b>: Elliott Hughes made it work on a 28848-core machine 289and fixed a glitch with -n, Haroon Maqsood pointed out "vmstat 1 1" didn't 290stop and "vmstat -n" didn't print the first theader line. 291Minghui Liu fixed a bug where <b>cp</b> -p didn't preserve 292timestamps, and pointed out the b, c, and d suffixes on numbers weren't 293working. Ryan Pritchard pointed out that <b>du</b> -d0 should act like du -s. 294Filip Perich made an RFC2347 OACK compliance fix to <b>tftp</b> in pending. 295Zach van Rijn fixed a bug in <b>xxd</b> causing incorrect translation of 296uppercase characters. 297Elliott fixed several things in <b>top</b> (removed spurious '\r' characters from -b 298output, removed interactive flicker, made running processes bold), and 299pushed Rob to make <b>file</b> work better recognizing things on stdin 300("cat /bin/ls | file -" still won't work but "file - < /bin/ls" should). 301Rob fixed a bug in <b>netstat</b> on 64 bit big endian systems, 302and fixed <b>cut</b> -DF 303(a posix compliance fix broke its ability to act as a decent awk replacment 304because outputting all delimiterless lines isn't what you want there, -D 305now disables that too).</p> 306</u></p> 307 308<p><u>Documentation</u>: Rob added a buildroot section to the roadmap with the 309prequisites that needs to run, and reformatted more of the ps --help text 310to two columns.</p> 311 312<p><u>Library</u>: 313FLAGS_NODASH is now set in toys.optargs when an optstring starting 314with & has no dash in its first argument. (This lets "ps -ax" and "ps ax" 315behave differently.) Factored out xtestfile() into lib/. 316The comma-separated-list parsing infrastructure moved to lib/commas.c. 317Added mkpath() for the common case of mkpathat() and #defined MKPATHAT_* 318constants for the uncommon cases. Elliott added better error checking 319to xparsetime() and fixed a bug in names_to_pid() (used in <b>pidof</b> 320and <b>killall</b> and such). 321Rob inlined the old toys/e2fs.h into pending's mke2fs, 322and removed a rogue semicolon from the WOULD_EXIT() macro that screwed 323up if() statement levels. The do_lines() semantics changed adding a 324callback(0,0) at the end of each file.</p> 325 326<p><u>Tests</u>: 327The test_* commands under toys/example were all renamed demo_* so 328they don't share a namespace with running a standalone command 329through the test suite (ala "make test_sed"), then 330demo_human_readable became demo_number so it can also test atolx() 331suffixes. The readlink.test was getting confused by a 332behavior difference between toybox and ubuntu (Ubuntu's ln -sf wouldn't 333replace a symlink that pointed to itself, toybox's would), now there's 334an explicit rm so it works on ubuntu too. The test suite plumbing's 335error message for a test with the wrong number of arguments now 336correctly identifies which test it's complaining about, and it can now 337run a test on a command name beginning with "-" (none yet but it 338comes up in toysh).</p> 339 340<p><u>Building</u>: You can now override strip with $STRIP. The set of 341"make install_airlock" commands got tweaked for the 4.17 kernel (which 342needs bison and flex because the new kconfig plumbing doesn't have _shipped 343versions of those generated files like the old kconfig did), and for 344the new release (remove ping, toybox provides it now). 345$LDFLAGS now applies to library probing (the android NDK provides 346dynamic libraries without corresponding --static versions). 347Elliott took a CFG_TOYBOX_DEBUG check out of an error_exit() to make 348clang stop complaining about an error that should never happen.</p> 349 350<a name="24-02-2018" /><a href="#24-02-2018"><hr><h2><b>February 24, 2018</b></h2></a> 351<blockquote><p> 352"Arthur," said Ford.<br /> 353"Hello? Yes?" said Arthur.<br /> 354"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."<br /> 355"Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that."<br /> 356</p> 357<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 358</blockquote> 359 360<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.6.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.6</a> 361(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.6>git commit</a>) 362is out, a month and change late.</p> 363 364<p>This release adds a <b>crc32</b> command and 365cleans up and promotes <b>iconv</b>, <b>logger</b>, and <b>setfattr</b>. 366Pending added <b>stty</b> and <b>fmt</b>, the other half of <b>ping</b>, 367and got a lot of cleanup on <b>gzip</b>/<b>gunzip</b>/<b>zcat</b>.</p> 368 369<p>The <b>cut</b> command got a complete rewrite adding support for multiple 370ranges, utf8/unicode characters, and new -CDFO options. Use -C to measure 371columns rather than characters (for double width chars), and "cut -DF 3-5" 372selects words (like "awk '{print $3 $4 $5}'").</p> 373 374<p>This release adds <b>top -m</b> and <b>iotop -H</b> (and fixed top width truncating for narrow terminal windows), 375added <b>iconv -c</b>, fixed <b>ps -T 1234</b> to show threads belonging to 376that PID, improved <b>file</b>'s executable identification (properly recognizing 377both endiannesses and adding sh/frv fdpic, bpf, and new microblaze 378identifiers), and <b>blkid</b> now only shows LABEL= when it isn't blank.</p> 379 380<p>Running ./configure now does "make defconfig", help_exit() now shows the 381"See %s --help" message on the same line, and several web pages 382(about, code, roadmap, cleanup) got updates.</p> 383 384<p>Elliott and the Android devs added <b>df -i</b>, <b>uptime -p</b>, 385<b>time -v</b>, and <b>xxd -i -ri</b>, 386fixed <b>id -G</b> to only output the group IDs, fixed the <b>xargs -0 -n</b> 387combination, made <b>find -exec +</b> obey ARG_MAX (just like xargs), made 388<b>killall</b> kill scripts too, fixed an off by one error in <b>pidof</b> 389that could cause false positive matches in 15 character names, added 390gzip/gunzip/zcat tests, and taught <b>file</b> to identify more stuff 391(ogg, TrueType font, LLVM bitcode, PEM certs, and PE executables), and 392for some reason needed TOYBOX_VENDOR in the version stuff. 393Android <b>getprop</b>/<b>setprop</b> now allows ro. properties to have 394arbitrary lengths, <b>losetup</b> can now find loop devices under /dev/block (where android puts 395them for historical reasons), and Andreas Gampe pointed out a thinko in 396<b>top</b> that triggered llvm's address sanitizer checks.</p> 397 398<p>Gael PORTAY asked for mdev to work when Linux has the 399block layer configured out, Patrick Oppenlander pointed out a problem 400with make bloatcheck's build dependencies, and 401xuphung on github fixed config2help building on MacOS X.</p> 402 403<p>Commands with locale support now setlocale(LC_TYPE, "C.UTF-8") for more 404targeted locale support (enable character parsing with 405utf8 support, use "C" semantics otherwise). The toys/example/test_*.c 406commands got renamed demo_*.c.</p> 407 408<p>In lib.c the millitime() function returns current unix time in milliseconds 409(which as a 64 bit number is good for + or - 292 million years from 410midnight Jan 1 1970), and the old xgetty() function became tty_fd() returning 411-1 instead of erroring out.</p> 412 413<p>The "make help" text moved from the Makefile to scripts/help.txt, 414ls.c now lists some of its deviations from posix, and work is underway 415to make ps.c more intelligible (and figure out how to break it up into 416multiple files).</p> 417 418<a name="12-10-2017" /><a href="#12-10-2017"><hr><h2><b>October 12, 2017</b></h2></a> 419<blockquote><p>Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went 420mad now?</p> 421<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 422</blockquote> 423 424<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.5.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.5</a> 425(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.5>git commit</a>) 426is out.</p> 427 428<p>This is another <b>mostly bugfix release</b>. I delayed it a bit trying to get some 429of the many half-finished projects (dd, ping, lsof, iconv, cut, sysconf, 430the cp --parents option...) finished/promoted/tested, but decided adding big 431things at the end of the dev cycle would be too destabilizing.</p> 432 433<p>A couple <b>new features</b> slipped in anyway. Ilya Kuzmich added head -c 434and strings -t (and corrected strings' output in a couple places). Elliott 435Hughes taught file to recognize Macintosh (Mach-O) binaries.</p> 436 437<p><b>NOTE</b>: the chrt command is broken when built against musl-libc 438because that project's maintainer decided he didn't like the system calls 439it depends on, so he 440<a href=https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/commit/?id=1e21e78bf7a5>removed 441them from his libc</a>. The prebuilt binaries are built against musl, 442so the chrt command there will always say -ENOSYS. (It works fine built against 443glibc, and presumably bionic or uClibc.)</p> 444 445<p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Remounting (mount -o remount,rw) should work properly now, 446and we fixed another place ps was segfaulting when /proc 447entries vanished out from under us (a hard to hit race condition 448mostly noticeable in long-running "top" exiting; error value was treated 449as a pointer). Elliott Hughes fixed a -Wformat warning in expr.c, 450and made xargs split the command 451line at ARG_MAX (which is 1/4 the stack size ulimit, which normal users 452can arbitrarily increase but execve() will complain if they don't). 453Josh Gao made netcat -l exit after handling a request, and reported a 454seq bug (seq "1000000 10000001" output 1e+06, fixed now). Zach Riggle fixed a 455broken URL in the README. Rob fixed env -0 checking the flag wrong so 456it didn't work in combination with other flags (typo).</p> 457 458<p><b>Plumbing</b>: 459Replaced mbrtowc() with a new utf8towc() that doesn't have a context 460struct or care about locale. A bugfix in comma_scan() (wasn't removing an entry at the end 461of the list) is why remount _sometimes_ worked (depending on argument 462order), xgetaddrinfo() is now separate from xconnect(), 463atolx_range() learned the w (word=2) suffix, and b is now (block=512) instead 464of (byte=1).</p> 465 466<p><b>Build</b>: Patrick Oppenlander added a workaround for a bug in config2help.c 467that resulted in segfaults on newer toolchains. (It was actually a use 468after free error; the build infrastructure isn't nearly as heavily audited as 469code that gets installed on the target; oops.) A new GITHASH 470environment variable can force the build version from 471the command line, and the build checks for .git in the top directory 472before asking git what our version is (so it isn't confused by ../../.git 473in an enclosing directory). Added a build #warning about musl intentionally 474breaking chrt (as with nommu fork() musl now provides a broken 475stub function so compile-time probes for its existence think it's there, and 476you can't run the result to test behavior when cross compiling).</p> 477 478<a name="19-06-2017" /><a href="#19-06-2017"><hr><h2><b>June 19, 2017</b></h2></a> 479<blockquote><p>It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. 480To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.</p> 481<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 482</blockquote> 483 484<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.4.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.4</a> 485(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.4>git commit</a>) 486is out. No new commands this time, but 487<b>chrt</b> and <b>dmesg</b> got promoted out of pending.</p> 488 489<p><u>New features</u>: 490Rob rewrote paste, which should work much better now, and added grep 491-M and -S to match and skip wildcards respectively (useful with -r). 492Elliott's updated dmesg has -T and --color. The file 493command can recognize gzip now, uptime grew -s, date grew %N, env knows - as a first argument 494means -i (posix!) and grew -0, ls defaults to -b 495instead of -q now when there's a tty, and ls has a new -ll option (with 496--full-time as a compatibility synonym) showing nanoseconds and (for some 497reason) timezone. (Why do individual files have timezones?) Elliott added 498"uudecode -o -" support. Illya Kuzmich taught head -v and -q. The cpio 499code no longer adds the "TRAILER!!!" entry by default (initramfs extractor 500doesn't care) without which you can concatenate cpio archives with "cat". 501(Use the new --trailer option if you want the legacy behavior.) 502In pending, fdisk compiles now and tar understands bzip2.</p> 503 504<p><u>Build</u>: 505The "make install_airlock" target now symlinks bc from the host because 506the kernel <a href=https://landley.net/notes-2013.html#28-03-2013>inexplicably</a> 507needs that to build. This was motivated by 508<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a>, which builds under 509a toybox airlock directory.</p> 510 511<p>Lots of work on the test suite, mostly from the Android guys who are now 512running it under Android. This fixed several existing tests that didn't 513pass, made more tests run on a toybox-only system, and so on. The test suite 514infrastructure now has a second testing function, 515"testcmd", which supplies the command name being tested (bypassing 516shell builtins).</p> 517 518<p>Various android build and config fixes, getting closer to being able 519to let android someday use scripts/make.sh instead of generated/* snapshots. 520Also more work into building under android's NDK; not quite there yet 521but much closer. 522Use nproc in scripts/make.sh detect available processors (so you can control the SMP level with taskset). 523Removed the old uClibc compatibility glue, it's been 5 years since their 524<a href=http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2016-December/180102.html>last release</a>.</p> 525 526<p>The new config option TOYBOX_PEDANTIC_ARGS checks arguments when there 527are no arguments, so things like "uptime" no longer silently ignore arguments 528you pass but instead refuse to run.</p> 529 530<p><u>Docs</u>: 531The FAQ now has more than one entry. Commands no longer output the full 532help text for argument errors but instead just say "See %s --help" with the 533command name (in addition to the actual error message). 534Elliott did a big period-ectomy on all the --help text, and 535we cleaned up some tab/space inconsistency. The 536non-html help -a output now has separators with the command name. 537The top/iotop and pkill/pgrep help text now describe a lot more of what 538the commands can do. Twitter's code of conduct page went down so we 539mirrored the text locally.</p> 540 541<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 542Fixed a race condition in ps/top where a process that exited right as we 543read its data returned a different error value than we were expecting (which 544was causing long-running top instances to occasionally exit), 545mount now gives an error if it can't autodetect the filesystem 546type, ps no longer queries the terminal size when output isn't to a tty 547(so "ps -A | cat" doesn't vary), date's chkmktime() was replaced with 548simple range checks for fields (to avoid false positives from things like 549timezones and daylight savings time), removed %s from date's help (we 550didn't implement it, we have @seconds[.nanoseconds] instead), fixed 551zcat's buffer flush logic (which was always failing on files larger 552than 32k), and factor now detects requests for numbers >64 bits and fails 553loudly instead of producing incorrect answers. 554Elliott fixed touch -a/-m (they were backwards), and allowed ':' in 555setprop's property names. Grep now exits with 2 for errors (so -q can 556distinguish "didn't find" from "didn't work"), doesn't stop on symlinks 557that point nowhere (there was an error_exit() that should just be a warning), 558and provides error messages for files we could open but not read.</p> 559 560<p><u>Library</u>: 561New library functions: strend() complements strstart(), minof()/maxof() 562are min/max macros that evalute arguments once and autodetect type (why 563isn't this in libc?), xmmap() checks MAP_FAILED (which is not NULL).</p> 564 565<a name="21-02-2017" /><a href="#21-02-2017"><hr><h2><b>February 21, 2017</b></h2></a> 566<blockquote><p>Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the 567Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention 568away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.</p> 569<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 570 571<p>Despite everything, <a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.3.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.3</a> 572(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.3>git commit</a>) 573is out. The <u>new commands</u> this time are <b>ftpget</b>, <b>ftpput</b>, <b>microcom</b>, and <b>ascii</b>.<p> 574 575<p>We also had two command _demotions_ out of defconfig: 576<b>hostid</b> got moved to toys/example and 577switched to "default n" because despite <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/gethostid.html>still being in posix</a> 578the concept of a unique 32 bit number identifying a system is something 579Linux outgrew about the time Pauline Middelink wrote the first IP 580Masquerading code. And Elliott did a complete rewrite of <b>dmesg</b> introducing 581two codepaths that I didn't get a chance to unify and didn't want to 582hold up the release for, so that's back in pending.</p> 583 584<p><u>New features</u>: Rob added units to <b>find</b> -atime and friends 585(with the legacy -amin alias). Elliott added color and -w to dmesg, fallocate 586-o, and improved file's ELF parsing. Steve Muckle added -d and finit_module 587support to modprobe. Rob and Elliott tweaked the 588ps/top display format a bit more (extending the USER field from 8 to 18 chars 589and putting + at the end of string fields that got truncated). 590df -a isn't entirely new, but wasn't documented and needed a bugfix.</p> 591 592<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 593Last release broke oneit because -c didn't get moved to xopen_stdio() (oops). 594Rob and Elliott simultaneously spotted ps padding each line to 99999 595chars when there's no tty (serial console or adb); now it pads to 80 in 596that case but also switches on -w to avoid field truncation. The "tty" 597field also sometimes had trailing debris (that's fixed now). And "top" was 598endlessly redrawing with out tty because receipt of the ANSI size probe 599results would set SIGWINCH, and handling that sent another ansi probe. (Sigh.) 600And while we're there, replace "ADDR" with "BIT" in ps -l so there are 601more than 4 chars left for the "CMD" field on 64 bit systems.</p> 602 603<p>Izabera pointed out that split -b and -l can't mix, and suggested seq should 604multiply to avoid accumulating rounding errors from repeated fractional 605increments. Wang Xiao Jian fixed a bug in sort -k. 606Elliott let getprop use the @ character in property names, and 607Dimitry Ivanov removed the name length limit for system properties. 608Elliott also improved some error reporting and improved top -H's display 609of thread names. 610 611<p>Josh Gao pointed out that recursive operations on . and .. could be ignored 612in chmod -R (and the resulting generic fix to dirtree_notdotdot() fixed 613it in several other places).</p> 614 615<p>Justin Cormack caught tar producing a warning to stdout that screwed up 616"tar c" to stdout. 617Rob fixed an option parsing bug (where switching off a --longopt in menuconfig 618confused the parser), and another one where an option excluding itself 619(ala "abc[-ab][!abc]" with "command -a -b") would segfault.</p> 620 621<p>There's some sort of gcc stack over-optimization bug where musl-libc's 622version of vfork() doesn't get marked with attribute(returns_twice) so 623stack varabiles in the same function after that get semi-randomly overwritten 624when the optimizer decides to reclaim the space. So add the attribute 625to the function the XVFORK() wrapper macro calls. (It's a nommu thing.)</p> 626 627<p>Fixed a couple variable size mismatch bugs that were only tested on 64 bit 628(printf %x 64) or only tested on 32 bit (modprobe), removed some 629unnecessary casts in stat.</p> 630 631<p>Continuing attempts to build under Android NDK brought up that posix 632defines the global 'stdout' as a macro, which older versions of bionic 633turned into an array member, but a function was using it as an argument 634name. (This worked in the AOSP build because it only builds against current 635bionic, where there's a global 'stdout'.)</p> 636 637<p>Several commits argued with clang's warning generation, eventually 638settling on a variant of __attribute__((__shut_up__)).</p> 639 640<p>Android should no longer give spurious error messages 641when you "ps -A | head" about EPIPE on output. (Older versions of bionic 642set an error handler on SIGPIPE, but it shouldn't do that now. More recent 643versions of adb set the SIGPIPE handler to SIGIGN instead of SIGDFL, 644leading to write returning an error message instead of silently killing 645the program. So we set it back to the default.)</p> 646 647<p><u>Docs</u>: 648Removed website link to the gmane archive (which didn't survive gmane's 649change of ownership). The FAQ now answers a _second_ question. (Woo!) 650Some roadmap updates.</p> 651 652<p><u>Build tweaks</u>: 653Upgraded "make install_airlock" target to only warn about missing 654commands (unless $PEDANTIC is set) when it sets up the hermetic build 655path. (The plan is still to implement everything but the toolchain 656binaries in toybox, but in the meantime we're symlinking other stuff from 657the $HOST that isn't ready yet. See 658<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> for an example using 659this.)</p> 660 661<p>Elliott and Rob continue to poke at building toybox with Android's NDK, 662but it's a work in progress (<a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-December/008767.html>thread</a>). Various changes 663removing libcutils dependencies and adding an selinux dependency to getprop 664are fallout from this.</p> 665 666<p>Cross-compiling from Macs needs to use "gsed" instead of apple's 667version, so teach the build to use that name if it exists in the $PATH. 668If you try to build without running config first, you should get better 669error reporting now. Added a workaround for Centos' broken "which" command 670producing output when it _can't_ find a name in the $PATH.</p> 671 672<p><u>Library</u>: 673The new dirtree flag DIRTREE_PROC skips non-numeric entries so things 674like ps and top can scan /proc more efficiently.</p> 675 676<a name="21-10-2016" /><a href="#21-10-2016"><hr><h2><b>October 21, 2016</b></h2></a> 677<blockquote><p>Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat, 678we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your 679own problem.</p><p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 680 681<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.2</a> 682(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.2>git commit</a>) 683is out.</p> 684 685<p>During this development cycle, Elliott Hughes <a href=http://androidbackstage.blogspot.com/2016/07/episode-53-adb-on-adb.html>got interviewed 686on the ADB podcast</a> 687and Rob Landley <a href=http://linuxluddites.com/shows/episode-88/>got interviewed on Linux Luddites</a> (<a href=http://linuxluddites.com/shows/episode-11/>again</a>). 688Both talk about toybox and many other things. 689The web page also grew a new <a href=faq.html>FAQ page</a>, currently with 690just the one.</p> 691 692<p>New comands added to defconfig are <b>tunctl</b>, 693<b>log</b>, <b>start</b>, <b>stop</b>, and <b>sendevent</b>. 694The commands <b>file</b> and <b>netstat</b> got promoted out of pending. 695Pending added <b>chrt</b>, <b>setfattr</b>, and <b>getfattr</b>, and saw 696a lot of cleanups to diffstat and dd but not enough to promote them to 697defconfig yet. A new toys/net directory was added, moving ifconfig, netcat, 698netstat, rfkill, and tunctl there so far.</p> 699 700<p><b>Upgrades</b>: All commands now parse --version when they understand 701--help, but "true" and "false" should now ignore their arguments entirely. 702We taught stat to handle "%12x" and "%.12x" printf-style escapes, which 703apparently other versions do. The ifconfig output now shows the interface's 704device driver. Added patch -d and --dry-run, wc can now do -cm together, 705find has a NOP -noleaf so scripts that use that don't break, add -c to md5sum 706and sha1sum. Elliott taught ps to treat extra aguments as additional -p 707pids, implemented xxd -s, did a number of upgrades to file (added -HL, 708support for ar files, improved ELF support to report android API level 709and stripped/not stripped and it no longer prints a guessed build ID type). 710Elliott also added optional build-time support for using openssl's 711assembly-optimized md5sum/sha1sum implementations (leading to a new 712<a href=design.html>design</a> policy on shared libraries).</p> 713 714<p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Too many fixes to "ps" and "touch" to list, from both 715Elliott and Rob. Rob taught sed to handle s/[[:space:]/]// type sequences 716properly, switched grep to a better 717workaround for <a href=https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17829>glibc bug 17829</a>, made sed -i preserve ownership when run as root, 718made du max out at 2 terabytes instead of 2 gigabytes on 32-bit systems 719(it was always designed to, but was missing a typecast), 720fixed the option parsing infrastructure (config options that remove command 721line options got the placeholders wrong), fix to printf for printing 722octal digits and handling the (posix-mandated) difference between %b and 723non-%b octal output, reading from "-" no longer closes stdin when done, 724netcat -L works with nommu (although it may need more portability work), 725and you can now "make test_scankey" if you want to. Several commands 726(stat, makedeves, chgrp, cp, find) handled user name lookup failure badly 727(stat was segfaulting if you interrogated a file belonging to a nonexistent 728user, "chown 12345 file" errored out if you didn't have that user 729in /etc/passwd... now they should all print/accept the number when 730appropriate). "LC_ALL=C ls -Cs --color" produces the same output 731as other versions (two spaces padding, -k hardwired on).<p> 732 733<p>Kyungsik Lee fixed a bug 734in cp (readlink() doesn't actually null terminate the string it reads in), 735Elliott Hughes made pgrep/pkill return success/failure, fixed trailing 736whitespace in netstat, fixed a SMACK symbol conflict due to linux/xattr.h 737changing, fixed ls -sh, and added a lot of 738stuff to the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap page</a>. 739Izabera pointed out cmp -l and -s can't be selected at the same time, 740that timeout was never actually checking -v, that ls should default to -q 741when output is to a tty, and that "file -" would sometimes try to open "-" 742instead of stdin. 743Usischev Yury pointed out a use after free error, and that id shouldn't 744call exit() directly. Matthias Urhahn pointed out that stat(2) returns 745hardwired 512-byte units, so stat.c was wrong. David Hedges pointed out 746that route could only handle 10 character interface names when the kernel 747can do 15 (it's still in pending for a reason, but fixed). Evgenii 748Stepanov found and helped diagnose one of the more subtle ps bugs fixed 749this time around.</p> 750 751<p>Calling "make test_blah" no longer causes make to error out if the last 752test fails (and thus returns a nonzero error code). 753Building single commands and the multiplexer used to require a "make clean" 754between them (because they had different config files both of which were older 755than generated/config.h so it didn't get rebuilt; now it just always 756rebuilds it).</p> 757 758<p>The defconfig build is now slightly less broken on older centos versions 759(although <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-September/008664.html>the consensus</a> is that Centos is just generally broken).<p> 760 761<p>Several commands were over-using xprintf(), which flushes its output 762to check for error (something you only need to do maybe once per line, 763and even then maybe only in loops because xexit() flushes and checks 764ferror() for you and adjusts the exit code if we wrote stuff to stdout 765that couldn't be printed). Lots of little flushes are inefficient, 766so most things can use normal printf(). (Retransmission 767of short writes is presumably libc's problem since it's buffering the 768output and all.)</p> 769 770<p><b>Library:</b> 771New library functions readlink0() and readlinkat0() which properly null 772terminates the symlink value (which the stock libc function inexplicably 773doesn't). 774The new do_lines() function interates reading lines from a filehandle 775and calling a function on each line. 776New function pollinate() factoring out netcat's poll() loop so things 777like telnet can use it. 778New functions getusername() and getgroupname() return a 779char * given a uid/gid (and return a string representation of the number 780if the lookup fails), and xgetpwnamid/xgetgrnamid were renamed to 781xgetuid/xgetgid and now return an integer instead of a struct (also helping 782handle lookup failures, you can still return the uid/get for "12345").</p> 783 784<p>Switched atolx() to use long long internally. 785Renamed xopen() to xopen_stdio() and made a new xopen() that never returns 786stdin, stdout, or stderr (duping /dev/null into the filehandles as necessary). 787New function xopenro() opens a file read only with one less argument, and 788understands that "-" means stdin. New flag WARN_ONLY tells these functions 789to just print a warning on failure, and return -1 instead of exiting. 790Misc new functions like openro() which defaults to the WARN_ONLY behavior 791and notstdio() which dup()s a filehandle up beyond stdin/out/err backfilling 792with /dev/null as necessary. The WARN_ONLY flag let us remove the failok 793argument from loopfiles().</p> 794 795<p>New TOYFLAG_NOHELP disables --help processing (which "true" and "false" 796should not do).</b> 797 798<p>The test suite now has NOSPACE=1 to ignore whitespace (using diff -b to 799check results), which helps TEST_HOST pass the same tests as toybox. 800Fixes to chattr and date tests. It also has a new variable $C with the 801absolute path to the command being tested (bypassing shell builtins), 802and a function testcmd() which is just like testing() except it prepends 803the command name ($C) to the test command line as well as the test 804description.</p> 805 806<a name="02-06-2016" /><a href="#02-06-2016"><hr><h2><b>June 2, 2016</b></h2></a> 807<blockquote><p>When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but 808highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic 809analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental 810signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's 811brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows 812quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of 813liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.</p> 814<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 815 816<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.1</a> 817(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.1>git commit</a>) 818is out. (Yes, I forgot to update the --version string, but I already 819uploaded the <a href=downloads/binaries/0.7.1>binaries</a>.)</p> 820 821<p>The website has https support now, you can "make cat ps ls" 822to get standalone commands (and "make list list_pending" to see what's 823available), and a whole lot of bugfixes and new options to existing 824commands.</p> 825 826<h2>New Commands</h2> 827<p>Rob implemented <b>ulimit</b>. In pending, Elliott Hughes implemented 828file. and Lipi Lee implemented a simple wget. (Pending also had minor 829cleanups to more and lsof, but no promotions this time around.)</p> 830 831<h2>New Options</h2> 832<p>Izabera implemented env -u, suggested adding seq -w, made factor 833use full unsigned 64 bit math even on 32 bit platforms, pointed out base64 834-w0 should disable wrapping, and sped up wc -c. 835Elliott Hughes added mount -o relatime, xxd -p -r, and od -w. 836Sameer Pradhan (or possibly Bilal Qureshi) suggested adding stat -tL -c %m%t%T. 837Tom Cherry added getprop -Z. Paul Barker added hostname -b and -F. 838Rob added ls -b, made ls -q work with utf8, 839made sed -f - read from stdin, and added top -O (like ps -O).</p> 840 841<p>Elliott and Rob <b>added Thread support to ps and top</b>, 842with -o TID, TNAME. We also added -o PCY (android scheduling policy), 843-o BIT (process is 32 or 64 bit), and -o TNAME now shows the parent 844command name for threads.</p> 845 846<h2>Documentation</h2> 847 848<p>Rob added the sed invocations to convert tabs/spaces and back to 849design.html. Isaac Dunham updated hexedit's help text. 850Jakob Flierl pointed out a broken URL in the README.</p> 851 852<p>Rob also redid the naming scheme of sed's pattern manipulation code to 853remove the gratuitous references to Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series, since it 854was confusing people.</p> 855 856<h2>Bugfixes</h2> 857 858<p>Grep -H and -n should now work properly with -ABC. Andy Chu pointed out an 859out of bounds access for zero length lines in rev, fixed a buffer overflow 860in diff -r, and fixed operator precedence in expr (although Rob is rewriting 861chunks of expr so toysh can use its plumbing for $(( )) ). 862Patrick Ohly fixed the too-aggressive suid permission dropping logic. 863Josh Gao fixed a segfault when find -iname got no argument, and 864made tail -f work right with just one file argument. 865Tom Marshall cleaned up tar's long filename support and improved 866the tar tests, and reported another find bug (with -iname -o -iname not 867tracking copy lifetimes properly) that got fixed.</p> 868 869<p>Elliott Hughes fixed wc -c to not trust zero length files to actually be 870zero length (/proc does that), fixed "mount -o rw,remount /system" on 871Android, removed trailing spaces on ps -o cmdline, fixed pkill -9 and 872the corresponding tests, made "insmod -" work, fixed top -b and tail -NUM, 873pointed out that ps shouldn't trim numeric fields for display size limits, 874and added some more 875explicit "sort" calls to make pipelines so build tempfiles are easier to cache. 876Rob <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/32b3587af261>fixed an insane sed thing</a> the perl 5.22 build was doing. 877Fixed mount -o to properly pass in leftover string data, and 878<a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-March/004790.html>documented how to use toybox to mount nfs</a> (warning: kernel patch 879to fix some bitrot in the kernel NFS driver's string parsing attached 880to that message).</p> 881 882<p>George Burgess IV corrected some variable types in traceroute. 883Base64 now wraps == properly. Fixed two bzcat segfaults reported by 884John Regehr. Andy Chu found a segfault in "sed -e 'c\'" with no trailing 885line, and implemented mv -n and cp -n. The cyanogenmod guys pointed out that 886cp -a shouldn't complain if a non-root user can't chown, and we added 887the output path to cp -r error messages while we were there (before was just 888the filename).</p> 889 890<p>Samuel Holland fixed blkid's handling of vfat labels, and 891fixed a segfault when basename was passed an empty string and an empty 892suffix. Davis Mosenkovs fixed touch -t seconds parsing. 893Rob fixed a bunzip bug reported by John Regehr (the bad CRC 894error message was printing a NUL argument).</p> 895 896<p>Not all of the commands build standalone, but more of them do now; 897scripts/single.sh can now build a "mv" that isn't actually "cp". 898The dependencies are more granualr, so "make top; make ps" no longer 899produces a broken ps that ignores -A (because ps.o wasn't getting rebuilt 900even though top had the FLAG macros for -A zeroed).</p> 901 902<h2>Build</h2> 903<p>Rob added a <b>warning when building commands out of 904pending</b>. (The pending directory is full of code that hasn't been 905properly vetted. Use at your own risk.)</p> 906 907<p><b>New build targets let you build individual commands by name</b>, ala 908"make ls cat ps", and you can run the test suite for each standalone 909command with "make test_ls" and such. 910"make list" shows all such standalone commands in defconfig, and 911"make list_pending" shows unfinished commands from toys/pending 912("make list list_pending" shows both together). "make clean" now deletes 913these filenames at the top level, and the corresponding unstripped files 914live in the directory generated/unstripped.</p> 915 916<p>Nicholas Boichat suggested switching make.sh to use $! for process 917enumeration during parallel builds (which is both more efficient and more 918portable), and suggested shell builtin replacements for wc/awk/sed so the 919build loop has fewer forks now.</p> 920 921<p>Lots of work on the test suite, much of it due to Andy Chu. It now 922consistently prints the name of the command being tested at the start of each 923test (and the common infrastructure does that, not each individual test), and 924"make tests" actually runs all the available tests now. 925Seperated pgrep and pkill tests, split lsattr/chattr, added fstype and base64 926tests. The "tests/files" directory now collects files for tests to 927use, with blkid, bzcat, and utf8 subdirectories: the $FILES variable 928gives a path to it, so "$FILES/blkid/ext2.bz2" and so on. 929The testsuite now has test files with 3 different types of "not utf8 output" 930sequences that require escaping, plus some combining character torture 931tests, direction reversals, and so on.</p> 932 933<p>Added dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK to various pending commands that need 934nommu conversion (which should fix the allyesconfig build).</p> 935 936<p>Static builds with selinux should work again.</p> 937 938<h2>Library</h2> 939 940<p>New bufgetgrgid() and bufgetpwuid() functions cache previous lookup info 941rather than repeatedly traversing /etc/passwd and /etc/group (which is slow). 942Added xpipe() to lib to catch pipe creation failure. 943The HELP_ macros generated by config2help.c now use a capital prefix 944to avoid collicing with help_exit() and such.</p> 945 946<p>The dirtree infrastructure got a cleanup pass in preparation for adding 947infinite recursion depth support (needed by rm -r), updated the 948<a href=code.html#ib_dirtree>documentation</a> to describe the new 949semantics (removing dirtree_start() and adding dirtree_flagread()). 950Now dirtree_recurse() takes the new dirfd as an argument.</p> 951 952<p>Split out _xexit() from xexit() and let sigatexit() set multiple 953callbacks.</p> 954 955<p>For years the man pages have said to #include <sys/types.h> to get 956major/minor/makedev but now that glibc 957<a href=https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-11/msg00253.html>has vowed 958to break existing programs</a> and replace it with another nonstandard header 959not in posix or lsb, we added our own functions to lib/ to do the transform 960ourselves (based on what the kernel actually expects).</p> 961 962<h2>Portability</h2> 963 964<p>Debian unstable started needing an extra header #include for some reason, and 965although printf("%.*s", INT_MAX, s) worked fine on Ubuntu 12.04 it 966didn't on 14.04, so added a workaround for that. Typecast a printf because 967wchar_t isn't a rigidly defined size. RLIMIT_RTTIME was 968added to the kernel in 2008 but you can't expect uClibc to have noticed yet, 969nor did it #define MS_RELATIME (added in 2006), or prlimit (2010)... 970(Given the improvements in musl and bionic, uClibc support may be dropped 971in a future release.) Given that the xattr functions were added during 972linux 2.5, we can #include its header unconditionally.</p> 973 974<p>Renamed basename_r() to something else to avoid conflicting with freebsd's 975libc, and both scripts/install.h and scripts/config2help.c no longer include 976toys.h (to make cross-compiling from systems we don't run on easier).</p> 977 978<p>Debian bug 635570 did something unspeakably nonportable, depending on 979"sed -e 'a\'" (with no next line of the pattern, so an unterminated 980continuation) to add a newline to the last line of input if and only if 981that last line of the input didn't have a newline, and to take no other 982action. This is well into "depending on a bug" territory, but we implemented 983it because otherwise Debian's install broke. (Of course this behavior 984is undocumented, non-obvious, and doesn't really make logical sense.)</p> 985 986<p>CONFIG_TOYBOX_NORECURSE now disables the stack measuring logic (which 987was giving some "security" code fits). Also we typecast pointers to (long) 988before comparing them to avoid spurious compiler "optimizations" that 989break the code.</p> 990 991<a name="02-02-2016" /><a href="#02-02-2016"><hr><h2><b>February 2, 2016</b></h2></a> 992<blockquote><p>"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that 993quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with 994you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." 995- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 996 997<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.0</a> 998(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.0>git commit</a>) 999is out.</p> 1000 1001<p>The new commands in defconfig are <b>iotop</b>, <b>top</b>, <b>pgrep</b>, 1002and <b>pkill</b> 1003(most replacing corresponding versions from pending). Added grep -ABC, 1004swapon -d (discard), mkswap -L (label) and UUID support, and find -delete. 1005Izabera added free -h and unshare -f. Josh Gao implemented tail -f. 1006Jose Bollo submitted cp --preserve=context,attr. Kylie McClain added 1007mktemp -u.</p> 1008 1009<p>In pending there's the start of a vi command, and Sameer Pradhan contributed 1010a new dhcp6. This cycle saw several rounds of route cleanup and a little dhcp 1011cleanup, but neither are complete yet. Lipi Lee did some cleanup to netstat.c 1012and Elliott Hughes removed warnings from traceroute.</p> 1013 1014<p>Lots of updates to ps: several new -o options, -k (--sort) -O and -M, 1015improved compatibility with Android's historical behavior, and 1016extensive internal code cleanup (including the removal of all 1017the magic constants).</p> 1018 1019<h3><b>Website</b></h3> 1020 1021<p>Dreamhost restored the <a href="#12-21-2015">missing 11 months</a> 1022to the mailing list archive, in the process deleting the month after 1023that. Now they've asked if I have mbox files archiving the new 1024gap (between December 20, 2015 to January 21, 2016, and presumably they 1025could also fill in the gap from December 14, 2014 to January 3, 2015 that's 1026been there since the last time they did this), 1027but due to some gmail filtering I've 1028<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2012.html#15-10-2012>never 1029been able to disable</a>, my copy of those files is spread among 3 different 1030mbox files I'd have to sort/filter/collate. (It's on the todo list.)</p> 1031 1032<p>Added a code of conduct to the README (we're 1033<a href=https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/code-of-conduct>borrowing twitter's</a>) because somebody 1034made it necessary.</p> 1035 1036<h3><b>Bugfixes</b></h3> 1037<p>Fixed another sed bug where any ] right after [ was skipped (not just the 1038first one in the range, so [[] didn't terminate). Fixed sort -f and added test cases. 1039Assume 80 columns in "ls -m | cat", ls -L is no longer backwards, 1040and ls of files with no paths no longer uses an uninitialized (zero) dirfd. 1041Several bugfixes 1042to find (Gilad Arnold fixed -perm, Daniel K. Levy fixed "find . -exec echo {}", 1043and while we're there I fixed find --prune, made "find . -execdir 1044echo {} + -execdir ls {} +" work, and ripped out the environment size 1045measuring code that checked for a 128k limit removed back in linux 2.6.22). 1046Elliott Hughes fixed the date command's parsing of 4 digit 1047years and documented the %s escape, fixed hwclock -u, and pointed out 1048that runcon needs to exec to do its job (not recursively call another 1049command_main() in the same process). Tom Marshall reported that blkid was 1050handling ext2 wrong. Mike Moreton corrected cpio extraction's uid and gid 1051values, and added a --no-preserve-owner option. Fixed the SUID permission 1052dropping logic (which was a bit over-zealous, preventing some commands from 1053running at all).</p> 1054 1055<p>I'm told that debian-testing broke its libc so the nsenter build breaks, 1056but my attempts to install the debian-testing network cd image under 1057qemu keep breaking. Maybe someday they'll fix it enough I can actually 1058reproduce the problem. (Debootstrap under unbuntu builds an ubuntu-flavored 1059chroot in which toybox builds fine.)</p> 1060 1061<h3><b>Documentation</b></h3> 1062<p>Rewrite of the about.html page, tweaks to design.html, and a re-triage of 1063sbase in roadmap.html. Update to mkstatus.py to collate multiple span 1064tags with the same id, resulting in a larger status.html page (which 1065was previously ignoring some commands in the roadmap).</p> 1066 1067<p>Expanded the defconfig/allyesconfig/allnoconfighelp text in "make help" 1068to explain what they're for.</p> 1069 1070<h3><b>infrastructure</b></h3> 1071<ul> 1072<li><p>Expanded toys.optargs to 64 bits so a command can have more than 32 options.</p></li> 1073<li><p>Added NOEXIT() wrapper to turn xwrap() functions into warning versions 1074using the existing longjump(toys.rebound) infrastructure.</p></li> 1075<li><p>Renamed dirtree->data to dirfd and stopped storing symlink length 1076into it (this fixed a bug where following symlinks to directories 1077didn't give a valid directory filehandle, noticeable with ls -Z).</p></li> 1078<li><p>New TAGGED_ARRAY() infrastructure generates index and bitmask macros 1079for arrays of structures starting with a name string.</p></li> 1080<li><p>New lib/linestack.c for utf8 fontmetrics (draw_str() and utf8len() 1081and so on), and for tracking multiple lines of text 1082(vi, less, shell history) that need wordwrapping and scrolling up/down.</p></li> 1083<li><p>Upgrades to lib/interestingtimes.c: scan_key() now has a timeout 1084in milliseconds and recognizes more sequences including ANSI 1085window size probes. New utf8 test files in tests/files/utf8 including 1086sequence reversing, stacked combining chars, and all three types of 1087unprintable sequences (low ascii <32 ala ^X, invalid utf8 sequences ala 1088<AB><CD>, and invalid unicode code points ala U+1234).</p></li> 1089<li><p>More comma handling code in lib.c: comma_args()</p></li> 1090<li><p>Added error_msg_raw() to shut up fortify's endless static checking false 1091positives.</p></li> 1092<li><p>readfileat() can now realloc() in a loop to read long files 1093("zcat | insmod" needed it).</p></li> 1094</ul> 1095 1096<h3><b>Roadmap</b></h3> 1097<p>We're getting close to having a self-hosting development environment 1098using toybox for the command line. The remaining busybox commands in 1099<a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>Aboriginal Linux</a> are:</p> 1100 1101<blockquote><p><b> 1102awk bunzip2 bzcat bzip2 dd diff expr fdisk ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip gzip 1103less ping route sh sha512sum tar test tr unxz vi wget xzcat zcat 1104</b></p></blockquote> 1105 1106<p>And the remaining non-busybox commands in Aboriginal Linux's build/host 1107directory (from the distcc, genext2fs, e2fsprogs, zlib, and squashfs packagesi) 1108are:</p> 1109 1110<blockquote><p><b> 1111mke2fs fsck.ext2 resize2fs distcc genext2fs unsquashfs distccd mksquashfs tune2fs 1112</b></p></blockquote> 1113 1114<p>Squashfs and distcc are probably out of scope for toybox, but mke2fs, 1115fsck.ext2, resize2fs, genext2fs, and tune2fs should all be added to the 1116above "busybox" replacement list.</p> 1117 1118<p>Remind me to include this countdown in future releases. Once they've all 1119been replaced, the next goal is <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>building AOSP under itself</a>.</p> 1120 1121<p>See the full <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> and <a href=status.html>status</a> 1122pages for more details.</p> 1123 1124<a name="12-21-2015" /><a href="#12-21-2015"><hr><h2><b>December 21, 2015</b></h2></a> 1125 1126<p>Yes, 11 months have gone missing from the mailing list web archive.</p> 1127 1128<p>Yesterday evening Dreamhost's mailman server went down (timing out trying 1129to connect). I poked them about it, they 1130<a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/678781271670149121>blamed 1131DNS</a>, I explained that the hang was _after_ the DNS lookup and 1132entered the dig info into the trouble ticket showing the IPs the DNS 1133queries were returning, they reinstalled the server at that IP from what I 1134assume was their most recent backup, and that's how 11 months of messages 1135vanished out of the archive.</p> 1136 1137<p>I've <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/679114451975467008>continued to poke them about it</a> but I honestly believe that's the best they 1138can do. <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>Last time</a> 1139this sort of thing <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>happened</a> 1140we went back and forth for months, so I added a link to a backup web 1141archive (in the nav bar on the left) that isn't controlled by dreamhost, 1142and thus doesn't gratuitously lose data on a regular basis. (I note 1143the earlier hole in Dreamhost's archive was never fixed either. That 1144was data never getting archived, this is a year's worth of data that 1145was in the archive until yesterday vanishing after the fact.)</p> 1146 1147<p>If you're wondering why the <a href=http://lists.landley.net>top level</a> 1148list page has been "temporarily disabled" for multiple years now... you'd have 1149to ask Dreamhost. I know I have. More than a dozen times.</p> 1150 1151<a name="03-11-2015" /><a href="#03-11-2015"><hr><h2><b>November 3, 2015</b></h2></a> 1152<blockquote><p>"Alright," said Ford. "How would you react if I said that I'm 1153not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity 1154of Betelgeuse?" Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way. "I don't know," he 1155said, taking a pull of beer. "Why - do you think it's the sort of thing you're 1156likely to say?" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1157 1158<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.1</a> 1159(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.1>git commit</a>) 1160is out.</p> 1161 1162<p>We have a new <b>ps</b> command with all the -o fields posix wants (although 1163it doesn't accept BSD non-dash option syntax yet), and <b>bunzip2</b> (not just 1164bzcat but the proper extract-in-place command). 1165Sameer Pradhan added <b>hostid</b> and <b>fsync</b>. 1166Elliott Hughes added <b>flock</b>. 1167 1168<p>The people waiting for <b>human readable number support</b> (du -hH, ls -h, 1169and so on) can thank Elliott Hughes for implementing it. (Our output doesn't 1170exactly match others' because we our "binary" mode will say 1.0G instead of 11711024M, which is a bug in the other one we didn't emulate.)</p> 1172 1173<p>The other big news is <b>nommu support</b>, tested on the new 1174<a href=http://nommu.org/jcore>jcore</a> processor but presumaby working 1175on any nommu system. A few commands don't support nommu yet, but those 1176are disabled by dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK in menuconfig when building 1177for nommu. The roadmap now has a large section analyzing the uClinux 1178project (note that <a href=http://nommu.org>nommu.org</a> is slowly replacing 1179<a href=http://uclinux.org>uclinux.org</a> as the standard repository of 1180all knowledge and wisdom about nommu. The old site <a href=#12-02-2012>contains 1181much that is apocryphal</a>, or at least wildly inaccurate, and the new one 1182is trying to improve on that).</p> 1183 1184<p>Both "make change" and scripts/single.sh (for building standalone commands 1185without the multiplexer logic) now use the top level .config 1186for toybox global settings such as Linux Security Blanket Module selection, 1187(so make defconfig before change now).</p> 1188 1189<p>Documentation updates to the <a href=code.html>code</a> and 1190<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> pages.</p> 1191 1192<h3>pending</h3> 1193 1194<p>In the pending directory Sameer Pradhan added tftp, 1195and Elliott Hughes sent lsof. Isaac Dunham upgraded mdev, 1196reboot, init, login, and modprobe, and fixed a distro-specific build break in 1197scripts/mkflags.h. Elliott Hughes and Lipi Lee made netstat -p handle 1198command lines longer than 21 characters, and Elliott fixed netstat -e and 1199some build warnings. Yeongdeok Suh fixed a warning in dhcpd. 1200I started cleanup on pgrep/pkill.</p> 1201 1202<h3>Command updates, bugfixes, and infrastructure</h3> 1203 1204<p>The multiplexer's "command not found" error exit is now 127, so now you can't 1205distinguish between a command not being found in the multiplexer and 1206the multiplexer itself not being found by the shell, because people wanted 1207that for some reason.</p> 1208 1209<p>Elliott Hughes made date reject invalid dates rather 1210than set the clock to something weird (setting the clock 100 years into the 1211future makes most Linux desktops surprisingly unhappy, and ntpdate won't fix it 1212either), fixed several ls -l display issues (user/group field ordering, 1213make user/group/lsmcontext left aligned), did the aforementioned 1214extensive work on human readable number output, fixed ionice's default 1215class, fixed a mv overwrite bug, made df's columns auto-size, added 1216--ppid and -Z to ps, and teamed up with Daniel K. Levy to fix 1217a segfault in find's handling of -newer -group or -user.</p> 1218 1219<p>Hyejin Kim added stat -c %T support. Colin Cross worked 1220on vmstat fixing 1221a header printing bug and calculating the bi and bo columns in the right 1222units. Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra 1223newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed. 1224Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain 1225pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax. 1226Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows 1227all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p> 1228 1229<p>Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra 1230newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed. 1231Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain 1232pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax. 1233Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows 1234all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p> 1235 1236<p>Two large thinko fixes in oneit: -3 was always enabled (which would 1237eventually block if the child never read the exiting PID numbers from its file 1238descriptor #3 until the pipe filled up), and the signal handlers weren't 1239set up right (for requesting semi-graceful halt/poweroff/reboot). 1240Calling install without a mode is now 0755, and install -g 0 no longer clashes 1241with cp --preserve. Better error message for ls -r on unreadable 1242directories, and ls -Z now uses O_PATH (with the /proc/self/fd/%d 1243workaround for kernel stupidity as necessary).</p> 1244 1245<p>Date now understands @unixtime[.fraction] and uses -D for 1246the set-side format (matching busybox's extension for this). The seq -f 1247string now checks that it's got exactly one %f escape with the correct 1248attributes (and a whole bunch of test cases for it). Fixed a bug 1249in od that screwed up the position indicator on arm and mips. 1250In stat the d/h units moved from %d %D to the default string. 1251And patch can now correctly apply hunks with trailing context to the start of 1252the file.</p> 1253 1254<p>The prompt argument moved out of yesno() (the caller can print the prompt 1255themselves). Replaced toys.exithelp with help_exit(). Added new 1256XVFORK() macro, and xpopen_both() calls /proc/self/exe when passed 1257a NULL argv (see cpio -p for example usage). Replaced toys.recurse 1258with toys.stacktop so the recurse or re-exec decision is now based 1259on bytes of stack space used. Marked a bunch of command-local functions 1260static.</p> 1261 1262<p>New additions to lib/ include strlower(), xconnect(), and the 1263aforementioned help_exit(). 1264The testsuite now has some infrastructure tests based on "example" 1265commands such as toys/examples/test_human_readable.c. 1266The login command finally got a long-overdue cleanup (it's one of the 1267commands that predate the "pending" directory but were part of the reason 1268for it). Hexedit had an 1269uninitialized variable (of course gcc didn't spot it, it was too busy 1270warning about "may be used uninitialized but never actually is" variables).</p> 1271 1272<p>Tweaked makefile so 1273"make CROSS_COMPILE=prefix-" (as well as "CROSS_COMPILE=prefix- make", 1274which still works). Toybox is now installed chmod -w so broken installers 1275(like the bunzip2 package's) that try to overwrite existing binaries won't 1276knock out the whole of toybox. 1277GCC 5.2.0 stopped being able to compile Linux 2.6.12's kconfig, but 1278we added a workaround. You can now build uptime without utmpx.h. 1279Alejandro Joya pointed out that enabling smack required smack on the host 1280as well as target when cross compiling, which is now fixed.</p> 1281 1282<p>Note: toybox can autodetect nommu support when building with a uClibc 1283toolchain such as <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/downloads/binaries/old/1.4.3/cross-compiler-sh2eb.tar.gz>the one from Aboriginal Linux</a>, 1284but <a href=http://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>with musl-libc</a> 1285you'll have to enable CONFIG_TOYBOX_MUSL_NOMMU_IS_BROKEN to work around the 1286fact they provide a non-functional fork() implementation that always returns 1287-ENOSYS, to prevent you from compile-time probing for nommu support when 1288cross-compiling. Unfortunately "preventing you from probing" seems to be 1289an explicit policy with musl, they also don't provide an "#ifdef __MUSL__" 1290because their library is perfect and you're only ever allowed to work around 1291other people's bugs, not theirs. So we have to use menuconfig to manually 1292enable musl-specific bug workarounds.</p> 1293 1294<a name="23-07-2015" /><a href="#23-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2015</b></h2></a> 1295<p>I recreated the <a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>0.6.0 source tarball</a> 1296(new sha1sum 08fb1c23f520c25a15f262a8a95ea5b676a98d54) 1297because I forgot to add --prefix to the git archive command when I updated 1298my release script from mercurial, so the files weren't in an enclosing 1299directory. (Ooops.)</p> 1300 1301<a name="19-07-2015" /><a href="#19-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 19, 2015</b></h2></a> 1302<blockquote><p> 1303The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic 1304component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar 1305hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it 1306around in." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy </p></blockquote> 1307 1308<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.0</a> 1309(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.0>git commit</a>) 1310is out. (Yes, git. See the <a href=#05-04-2015>previous news entry</a>.)</p> 1311 1312<p>Sorry for the unusually long gap between releases. Since last release Ye 1313Olde Project Maintainer traveled to japan twice and had two more "once 1314a century" floods at home. (Probably a coincidence.) Still catching up.</p> 1315 1316<h3><b>CELF/ELC talk and Wikipedia[citation needed] article</b></h3> 1317 1318<p>I gave another State Of The Toybox talk 1319(<a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04XwAbtPmAg>video</a> 1320<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2015.txt>outline</a>), in which I 1321repeat my <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#07-11-2013>perennial</a> 1322<a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/557309224535851009>complaint</a> 1323that Wikipedia[citation needed] 1324<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox>still</a> 1325<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#Controversy_over_Toybox>says</a> 1326toybox was relicensed before its hiatus, when relicensing was why 1327the hiatus ended.</p> 1328 1329<p>Since Wikipedia[citation needed] seems unable to do the 1330<a href=#15-11-2011>most</a> 1331<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/log/tip/LICENSE>basic</a> 1332<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011>research</a> on 1333this point, and has stuck to an incorrect sequence of events for years, 1334I've been gradually escalating my attempts to correct them. Toybox 1335came out of mothballs in November 2011 <b>because</b> it could be 1336relicensed. That's what opened up a new niche busybox wasn't already 1337filling with a 10 year headstart.</p> 1338 1339<a name="asterisk_back" /> 1340<p>The article has plenty of smaller issues<a href=#asterisk>*</a>, but 1341given that I gave an entire talk at Ohio LinuxFest in 2013 1342(<a href=http://landley.net/talks/ohio-2013.txt>outline</a>, 1343<a href=https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3>audio</a>) on why I switched away from GPL for 1344my projects, that one bugs me.</p> 1345 1346<h3><b>New stuff this release</b></h3> 1347 1348<p>There's a new android menu in menuconfig, and rather a lot of Linux 1349Security Module support (Smack for Tizen from Xavier Roche and José Bollo, 1350and SELinux for Android from Elliott Hughes; see 1351the Security Blanket menu under global settings in menuconfig) has 1352trickled in, although there's still more to come.</p> 1353 1354<p><b>New commands:</b> Added reset, nproc, ionice, and iorenice. 1355Elliott Hughes contributed xxd, runcon, 1356restorecon, load_policy, getenforce, setenforce, getprop, and setprop. 1357Promoted shred, nsenter, and hwclock.</p> 1358 1359<p>You can once again build catv now the flag infrastructure's been updated to 1360let it coexist with cat -v. 1361And on a long plane flight I wrote 1362hexedit, an interactive hex editor that implements the start of 1363cursor control infrastructure (for eventual use by less and vi and shell 1364command history and so on).</p> 1365 1366<p><b>New options:</b> Added sed -E as a BSD-compatible synonym for -r. 1367Upgraded oneit with -r (restart), -3 (send exiting PID values to child), 1368and signal handling. Added -v option to timeout, -m to mknod, -u to shred, 1369-t to dmesg, and -123 to head and tail. Added implicit "." to grep -r without 1370any files to work on. Hyejin Kim requested prefix support for truncate -s. 1371Greg Hackman added -inum to find. 1372Jan Cybulski added the smack side of ls -Z support. Various patches also 1373added -Z to mkdir, mknod, and mkfifo. 1374Basic cp --preserve support went in, but not yet the xattr/LSM parts.</p> 1375 1376<p>The toybox command now has a --version option, 1377which uses "git describe" if available.</p> 1378 1379<p><b>Build infrastructure:</b> 1380The "make change" target now saves the output of each failed standalone 1381command build in a .bad file, and "make defconfig" is quieter now.</p> 1382 1383<p>Paul Barker submitted a large patch changing command install paths so 1384"toybox can be installed alongside busybox without confusing 1385update-alternatives". (There's some argument over 1386what the right paths should be, and I'm waiting for 1387people to tell me what else needs fixing because I have no idea. I've 1388been symlinking /bin to /usr/bin since 2002 1389<a href=http://landley.net/writing/hackermonthly-issue022-pg33.pdf>for 1390historical reasons</a>.)</p> 1391 1392<p><b>Docs:</b> The repository link now goes to github, with another link 1393to the commit rss feed.</p> 1394 1395<p>Elliott Hughes updated the Android section of the roadmap 1396(and he would know). Redid bits of scripts/mkstatus.py to make updating 1397status.html easier, and the README is larger.</p> 1398 1399<p>More description of option parsing in code.html, which now describes the 1400FLAG_x macros, switching flag macro sets with FOR_newcommand, how 1401configuration zeroes flag macros and using FORCE_FLAGS to suppress the 1402zeroing of options shared between commands. Also added description of ";" 1403to make --longopts take an optional =value part, and more about TOYBOX_DEBUG 1404to check NEWTOY() option strings (otherwise a bad option string makes 1405lib/args.c obviously segfault, but doesn't explain why).</p> 1406 1407<p>Added a "Why 0BSD?" section to license.html when submitting zero clause bsd 1408to SPDX (according to the pending license spreadsheet, it's been approved for 1409SPDX 2.2).</p> 1410 1411<p>The old list of commands needing cleanup but not in pending was 1412removed from toys/pending/README and instead the issues were added 1413as TODO comments in the individual commands.</p> 1414 1415<p><b>Bugfixes:</b> 1416Fixed mount -a segfaulting without -O (reported by Janus Troelsen), 1417and made it try a "become rw" ioctl() on the block device before falling 1418back to mounting read only (because Android expects that). 1419Fixed printf -- and printf ---. Lots of tweaks to ls -l spacing with 1420different options. Make touch -d and -t actually set time when you don't 1421specify nanoseconds. 1422Fixed a subtle bug where recursive calls (toybox commands that run other 1423toybox commands) weren't resetting all their state. (This manifested as 1424a "no }" error from "find | xargs sed", but could cause other problems.) 1425And David Halls reported another sed bug trying to compile libiconv (which 1426left extra \ at the start of lines in a generated shell script, breaking 1427the build). Output an error message for "cat /mnt".</p> 1428 1429<p>Kylie McClain reported that mktemp broke when $TMPDIR was set to an empty 1430string (which is not the same as unset), that install/find didn't support 1431numeric uid/gids, and that sort -z affects both input and output. 1432Isabella Parakiss fixed a printf.c bug. 1433David Halls fixed bugs in install -D and find -exec. Samuel Holland 1434fixed unshare -r. Hyejin Kim fixed makedevs with a count of 1, fold -w 1435range checking, an error path in scripts/mkflags.c, added -i to dhcpd, 1436and stopped su from prompting the root user for the new user's password. 1437Jan Cybulski spotted wrong indentation when combining ls -s and -i with -C and 1438-x. José Bollo fixed stat %G. Sameer Pradhan fixed a bug in mkfifo -Z.</p> 1439 1440<p>Elliott Hughes asked for a default SIGPIPE handler to disable 1441the signal handler bionic's dynamic loader installs (yes really). Still not 1442100% sure what the correct behavior is there. (Posix is 1443(<a href=http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.standards.posix.austin.general/10915>actively unhelpful</a>, but at least they're taking 1444<a href=http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=789#c1976>years to 1445make up their mind</a>. Elliott also sent patches to fix a typo in 1446useradd.test, add missing arguments to error_exit() calls and clean up 1447printf() format strings, fix an off by one error in human_readable(), 1448fix dmesg -c error reporting, fix a segfault in comma_scan where the option 1449was the last item in optlist (triggered by mount -o ro,remount), fix 1450hwclock -w, made ifconfig print lowercase MAC addresses (it was bothering 1451him), and make terminal_size() read the right environment variable 1452(LINES, not ROWS). And he suggested the test suite notice high command exit 1453values (corresponding to segfault or other signals).</p> 1454 1455<p>People are apparently using toys/pending commands, despite the police tape 1456and flashing lights, so added louder warnings to toys/pending/README. 1457Elliott Hughes fixed various problems with tar, dd, more, and top. 1458Hyejin Kim cleaned up syslogd and dumpleases. Isaac Dunham added hotplug 1459support to mdev. Yeongdeok Suh added RFC-3315 ipv6 support to dhcpd.</p> 1460 1461<p>I rewrote ps.c from scratch (in pending), but it's not ready for real use 1462yet.</p> 1463 1464<p><b>Portability:</b> 1465On the portability front Bernhard Rosenkranzer fixed a problem where the 1466menuconfig code wouldn't compile in C99 mode. (This led to me documenting 1467the craptacular nature of kconfig in a README, and the plan to replace it 1468sometime before 1.0.) Some extra flags to shut up overzealous llvm warnings 1469were added (and have to be probed for because gcc complains about 1470arguments it doesn't recognize even when they switch stuff _off_ using 1471a standard syntax). Don't depend on malloc(0) to return non-null in ls. 1472David Halls fixed some mac/ios portability issues, 1473implying somebody's built at least part of toybox on a mac.</p> 1474 1475<p>Added basename_r() to lib/lib.c because the posix semantics for basename() 1476are stupid but what the gnu guys did to it was appalling. 1477Turns out bionic already had a basename_r(), but posix still doesn't. 1478Fixed it up in portability.h, but this 1479could break more stuff in future. (Correct fix is to lobby posix to add it, 1480which would probably take about 15 years...)</p> 1481 1482<p><b>Infrastructure:</b> 1483The build now checks $LDFLAGS for linker-only flags, and allows the strip 1484command to fail (binflt toolchains provide a strip that doesn't work). 1485Since time.c uses floating point, added TOYBOX_FLOAT dependency in config.</p> 1486 1487<p>There's a lib/lsm.h defining varous inline functions for linux 1488security modules stuff, if (lsm_enabled()) should turn into a compile-time 1489constant 0 and let code drop out when TOYBOX_LSM_NONE selected, but 1490testing against CFG_TOYBOX_LSM_NONE or derived symbols is still useful 1491becuase when it _is_ enabled the probe turns into a system call you 1492don't want to repeat too much.</p> 1493 1494<p>Switched a bunch of commands from signal() to xsignal(). Factored out 1495xgetgrnamid() and xgetpwnamid() into xwrap.c. Make time.c depend on 1496TOYBOX_FLOAT (since it always uses float so shouldn't be available on 1497build targets without even software float). Added readfileat() to lib/lib.c.</p> 1498 1499<p>The dirtree infrastructure now passes in full flags for the old symlink 1500field, and the new DIRTREE_SHUTUP flag disables warnings if a file vanishes 1501out from under you during traverse. New dirtree_start() wrapper to 1502create dirtree root with only two arguments.</p> 1503 1504<p>The not-curses infrastructure introduced by hexedit mostly moved to 1505lib/interestingtimes.c.</p> 1506 1507<a name="asterisk" /> 1508<a href="#asterisk_back" />Asterisk:</a> such when 1509Tim contacted me (my blog says a couple days before nov 13, 2011, I.E. 151011/11/11 not some specific day 2 months later) to ask if I wanted to work 1511on a new project he was proposing called 1512<a href=http://www.elinux.org/Busybox_replacement_project>BentoBox</a> 1513(because I used to do busybox, he'd forgotten toybox existed 1514until I brought it up). And don't ask me what "focuses not on compatibility 1515with its GNU counterparts" means when CP_MORE adds 7 non-posix options 1516and toys/other has 84 commands in neither posix nor LSB. I think they're 1517struggling to explain the difference having dismissed "licensing" as being 1518the reason it started up again after a long hiatus? The reason I don't think 1519GNU is special is there are a half-dozen other independent 1520implementations of the same unix command tools out there (AT&T, 1521BSD, Coherent, Minix, plan 9, busybox, toybox, and several more analyzed in 1522the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a>, and that's ignoring the implementations 1523written for DOS or in assembly over the years). But I do care what 1524Linux From Scratch expects, and if it's 1525<a href=http://archive.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-museum/7.6/LFS-BOOK-7.6-NOCHUNKS.html#ch-tools-gcc-pass1>calling mv -v</a> 1526then I impelement mv -v 1527even if <a href=http://landley.net/toybox/roadmap.html>posix hasn't got 1528it</a>. And I don't know why "gnu counterparts" would describe this when 1529util-linux isn't a gnu package, nor are info-zip, e2fsprogs, kmod, less, 1530procps, shadow, sysklogd, vim, zlib, sudo, dhcpcd...</p> 1531 1532<a name="05-04-2015" /><a href="#05-04-2015"><hr><h2><b>April 5, 2015</b></h2></a> 1533<p>Since <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox/>android</a> and 1534<a href=https://git.tizen.org/cgit/platform/upstream/toybox.git>tizen</a> 1535and <a href=https://github.com/kraj/meta-musl/tree/master/recipes-core/toybox>openembedded</a> 1536and <a href=https://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/toybox>gentoo</a> 1537and so on have all been using Georgi Chorbadzhiyski's git mirror rather 1538than the mercurial repository, I bit the bullet and switched the project's repo 1539<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox>to git</a>. Georgi's 1540<a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>mirror</a> is now pulling from that.</p> 1541 1542<a name="25-02-2015" /><a href="#25-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 25, 2015</b></h2></a> 1543<blockquote><p>"A common mistake that people make when trying to design 1544something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of 1545complete fools."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1546 1547<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.5.2</a> 1548(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1702>commit 1702</a>) is out.</p> 1549 1550<p>New promoted commands: sed (finally fixed enough it builds Linux From 1551Scratch), printf (cleaned up and promoted), shred and 1552base64 (the Tizen guys wanted them), getenforce, setenforce, and chcon (android), 1553mix (promoted with fixes from Isaac Dunham), nsenter (from 1554Andy Lutomirski, merged into unshare).</p> 1555 1556<p>Elliott Hughes submited a bunch of patches to support Android (to 1557both toybox and Bionic libc, which he maintains). On toybox's end this 1558involved a lot of fixups to portability.[ch] and fixes to over a dozen 1559commands, plus several new ones. Other portability fixes included working 1560with buildroot's uclibc fork and building for nommu targets.</p> 1561 1562<p>The new "make change" target builds each toybox command as a standalone 1563binary. Rather a lot of commands that didn't build by themselves (mv depending 1564on cp and so on) were hit with a large rock until they built standalone. 1565This involved rewriting bits of option parsing, more elaborate dependency 1566generation, making each command have its own config 1567symbol and main() function (even when it's just a wrapper calling another 1568command's main()), and so on. Also, some commands can't be built standalone 1569at a conceptual level: "help" describes other enabled commands and "sh" 1570has a number of bulitin commands (cd, exit, set) that require the 1571multiplexer infrastructure, so "make change" filters them out.</p> 1572 1573<p>The mailing list's web archive is still screwed up. Dreamhost has 1574been trying to fix it since approximately September. There are 1575<a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>two</a> 1576<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>other</a> less broken 1577archives, but neither has quite the same UI as mailman.</p> 1578 1579<h3>Bugfixes and tweaks</h3> 1580 1581<p>Cynt Rynt sent in tests for ifconfig, 1582Robert Thompson taught factor to accept whitespace separated arguments, 1583Hyejin Kim pointed out that some of mktemp's longopts were attached to 1584the wrong short options, 1585Luis Felipe Strano Moraes fixed a wrong free() call in bootchartd in pending. 1586Patches from Ashwini Sharma to make "df /dev/node" work, prevent du from 1587looping endlessly following symlinks, and to make expr.c 1588(in pending) understand == and regex matches. (Speaking of expr, it gets 1589priority groupings wrong but the bug was actually in the posix spec's 1590HTML conversion. They fixed the posix spec upstream for us. Still need 1591to fix the expr code, but it's in pending for a reason...)</p> 1592 1593<p>Some commands grew new option flags, such as cp --remove-destination 1594and touch -h.</p> 1595 1596<p>The parallel build has better error reporting now. When toybox needs to 1597re-exec itself to regain suid root permissions and hasn't got the suid bit, 1598it now gives the right error message ("not root" instead of "no such command"). 1599 1600<p>Added a test to "mount" to not mount the same device/directory combination 1601over itself (the OS catches this for block devices, but not for tmpfs). 1602Make blkid distinguish ext3 from ext4. Added catv back into cat (because 1603the Android guys wanted it, and they have historical usage on their side, 1604so...). Handle nanoseconds in touch.</p> 1605 1606<p>Fixed a segfault when CP_MORE was disabled (the resulting option flag list 1607no longer defined -d but still had it in option groups at the end). 1608Workaround for glibc redefining dirname() and basename() to random non-posix 1609semantics because gnu. (They could have created dirname_r() but didn't want 1610to.)</p> 1611 1612<p>Fix an ifconfig test that was preventing assigning an ipv4 address to 1613interface aliases. Several cleanup passes on hwclock but not quite 1614promoted out of pending yet.<p> 1615 1616<p>Fixed a wrong error message in rm (if you had a chmod 000 directory and 1617did rm -r on it without -f, after the prompt it would complain it was a 1618directory, which was not the problem).</p> 1619 1620<p>The gzip compression code now does "store only" output to stdout, for 1621what that's worth.</p> 1622 1623<p>Cleanup mountpoint and expand, and remove them from toys/pending/README 1624(a list of commands that predate the toys/pending directory but needed 1625another pass).</p> 1626 1627<h3>Library and infrastructure:</h3> 1628 1629<p>Reworked the option parsing infrastructure so more commands build 1630standalone (via scripts/single.sh or "make change"). The option flag bit 1631values are no longer packed, it leaves spaces where currently disabled 1632flags go, and you can #define FORCE_FLAGS so disabled flags aren't zeroed. 1633This allows multiple commands to more easily share infrastructure, even if 1634your current flag context is for a disabled command (switched off in config), 1635you can force them to stay on and as long as the flags read the same right 1636to left they'll have the same values.</p> 1637 1638<p>We've started removing use of strncpy() because it's a hugely broken 1639standard C function: the length is the maximum length to _append_, not 1640the size of the destination buffer. It memsets the remaining space it didn't 1641copy ala "memset(dest+strlen(dest), 0, len);" so 1642if you think len is the size of dest you're guaranteed to stomp memory off the 1643end). And if it runs out of space it won't null terminate because reasons. 1644(Meanwhile sprintf("%*s", len, str) is counting wide characters in your current 1645locale, so if you set a locale other than "C" it will also go past your 1646allocated buffer size. Whoever is maintining the C library standards is really 1647bad at strings.) 1648Instead we have xstrncat() which will error_exit() if src+dest+1 doesn't 1649fit in the buffer. (Because randomly truncating input data isn't necessarily 1650an improvement.) And there's always xmprintf().</p> 1651 1652<p>Similarly, strtol() doesn't return an error indicator on overflow, 1653you have to clear and then check errno. So new xstrtol() that cares 1654about overflow.</p> 1655 1656<p>The bionic and musl guys agree faccessat(AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) is not 1657supported, so stop using it.</p> 1658 1659<p>Fixed toy_exec() to detect when argc is in optargs, so we don't 1660need a separate xexec_optargs().</p> 1661 1662<a name="18-02-2015" /><a href="#18-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 18, 2015</b></h2></a> 1663<p>Dreamhost continues to be unable to make mailing list archives work, so 1664here's <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>another 1665list archive</a> with a less awkward interface than gmane.</p> 1666 1667<p>(Neither gives you the convenient historical monthly views of mailman, 1668but I still have hopes dreamhost will someday figure out what they're doing 1669wrong. They've only been trying since October. Last month they did a 1670<a href=http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2015/01/14/discussion-list-hardware-maintenance/>hardware upgrade to fix a software problem</a>, and the stale 1671data loads much faster now, so that's something.)</p> 1672 1673<p>Update (Feb 19): the archive started updating again, by discarding 1674all the pending data. So there are now _two_ giant holes in Dreamhost's 1675web archive, from Dec 15-Jan 3, and then another hole from Jan 16-Feb 18. 1676The relevant messages are in both of the other archives. Here's hoping 1677the chronic archive constipation problem won't happen a sixth time.</p> 1678 1679<a name="30-12-2014" /><a href="#30-12-2014"><hr><h2><b>December 30, 2014</b></h2></a> 1680<p>Due to Dreamhost's <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>ongoing</a> 1681<a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>inability</a> to make mailman 1682work reliably, I've added a link to a backup web archive at 1683<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>gmane</a> to the nav bar 1684on the left.</p> 1685 1686<p>You still subscribe to the list through 1687<a href=http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net>the first link</a>.</p> 1688 1689<p>Update (January 27, 2015): they're <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/558428839462703104>still working on it</a>.</p> 1690 1691<a name="19-11-2014" /><a href="#19-11-2014"><hr><h2><b>November 19, 2014</b></h2></a> 1692 1693<blockquote><p>"This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1694 1695<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.1</a> 1696(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1566>commit 1566</a>) is out.</p> 1697 1698<p>It's an interim release, mostly bugfixes. There are several new commands, 1699but they're all in pending.</p> 1700 1701<h3>Development</h3> 1702 1703<p>Finally implemented sed, which is still in pending because although 1704it's feature complete according to posix, and even passes the parts of 1705Busybox's sed test suite that aren't explicitly testing for gnu bugs we 1706don't want to copy, it's not yet good enough to build Linux From Scratch. 1707(The ./configure stages use very long sed scripts. 20 commits worth of 1708implementation and debugging, just under 1000 lines of code, and there's 1709still more to do. We're definitely up to some of the "fiddly" commands now. 1710Did you know "echo hello | sed p - -" segfaults gnu sed in Ubuntu 12.04? 1711Yeah...)</p> 1712 1713<p>Talked with the Tizen developers to follow up on their desire to 1714make toybox a part of the base Tizen system, and got a list of commands 1715to add to the roadmap. The tizen todo list is:</p> 1716 1717<blockquote><p> 1718wget, sha256*, gzip, gunzip, bunzip2, rsync, zdiff*, 1719less, ar, arch, base64, csplit, dir, fmt, join, 1720nproc, shred, shuf, stdbuf, stty, test, tr, unexpand, 1721users, vdir, diff3, sdiff, dosfsck (fsck.vfat), awk, fdisk 1722</p></blockquote> 1723 1724<p>(Most of which was already on the todo list, but it helps prioritize.)</p> 1725 1726<p>Fixed md5sum and sha1sum on big endian systems (reported by James McMechan). 1727Andy Lutomirski fixed unshare's help text and option parsing, 1728and submitted nsenter (a tool to use setns(2)) to pending. 1729Isaac Dunham implemented acpi -ctV options, and spotted the bug that ls -d 1730was inappropraitely following command line symlinks without -H or -L (it 1731should act like ls -l does), and ls -F handles symlinks wrong too. 1732Lukasz Szpakowski sent in two bugfixes to tail.c. Cynt Rynt spotted an 1733unnecessary assignment in lib/password.c.</p> 1734 1735<p>Ashwini Sharma's team was as busy as usual, submitting tr, crontab, and 1736ipcrm, and hwclock to pending, more features to the pending ip.c, and a 1737pile of bugfixes (to chgrp, killall, ifconfig, insmod, 1738losetup, comm, cp, id, xwrap, netcat, modprobe, nohup...) mostly found by 1739static analysis. (These fixes are mostly to seldom-used codepaths like the 1740TOYBOX_FREE config option, but test coverage is always appreciated.) Ashwini 1741also suggested upgrading ln -f to leave the original target alone if link 1742creation fails, and reported that mv -f and -i weren't implemented (now fixed).</p> 1743 1744<p>New config option: TOYBOX_NORECURSE prevents xexec() from making internal 1745function calls (for nommu systems with a finite stack).</p> 1746 1747<p>The "toybox" multiplexer command no longer adds a trailing space to each 1748line of command names, so things like "./toybox | tr ' \n' '|'" to create 1749a grep pattern snippet are easier to do. (Why you'd want to is your business, 1750but the output is tidier now.)</p> 1751 1752<h3>Infrastructure</h3> 1753 1754<p>Isaac Dunham added Android support to portability.h, including compile 1755probes for functions missing from bionic-libc, and annotated the commands that 1756use those functions. We haven't really tested building against bionic, 1757but in theory it's possible now.</p> 1758 1759<p>Running the test suite now color codes the PASS/SKIP/FAIL notifications 1760if output is to a tty. (And in case you missed it last time, VERBOSE=fail 1761to stop at the first failure is really useful.)</p> 1762 1763<p>In loopfiles_rw() use O_CLOEXEC instead of O_RDONLY to request the loop 1764function close filehandles for us. (Otherwise the callback function must 1765close each supplied filehandle itself.)</p> 1766 1767<p>The printf-style escape parsing ("\n" and friends) got factored out into 1768a new unescape() function.</p> 1769 1770<a name="02-10-2014" /><a href="#02-10-2014"><hr><h2><b>October 2, 2014</b></h2></a> 1771<blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. 1772The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss... 1773Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the 1774difficulties." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.<p></blockquote> 1775 1776<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a> 1777(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p> 1778 1779<h3>New commands</h3> 1780 1781<p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands 1782(cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p> 1783 1784<p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now 1785ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth 1786instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving 1787looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to 1788cut, touch, free, and id.</p> 1789 1790<p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini 1791Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded 1792fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code. 1793Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p> 1794 1795<h3>Build infrastructure</h3> 1796 1797<p><b>Parallel builds</b></p> 1798 1799<p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of 1800processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.) 1801Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain 1802about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now 1803gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p> 1804 1805<p><b>Standalone builds</b></p> 1806 1807<p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to 1808build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file 1809selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro 1810for the command. It enables each command's 1811sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build 1812full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when 1813the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro 1814now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY 1815without the NEWTOY</p> 1816 1817<p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that 1818aren't building standalone yet are:</p> 1819 1820<blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos, 1821whoami</p></blockquote> 1822 1823<p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY() 1824entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries 1825that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure 1826is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command 1827is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the 1828code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible 1829to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting 1830design goals in the two contexts.)</p> 1831 1832<p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual 1833commands. 1834 1835<p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p> 1836 1837<p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh 1838containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current 1839configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an 1840exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite 1841got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p> 1842 1843<h3>Internals</h3> 1844 1845<p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking 1846filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now 1847done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added 1848to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now 1849requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false). 1850Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various 1851pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can 1852use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode. 1853Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether 1854we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p> 1855 1856<p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges 1857(which happens when you suid something _other_ than root). 1858The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the 1859command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled), 1860toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse 1861internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth), 1862always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when 1863we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes, 1864dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in 1865error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an 1866option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments 1867saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched 1868off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio. 1869Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall 1870with no arguments (segfaulted).</p> 1871 1872<p><b>Portability</b></p> 1873 1874<p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx 1875to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl 1876maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed 1877instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section 1878to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your 1879build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do 1880a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make 1881it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns 1882requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch 1883to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current 1884musl source control.)</p> 1885 1886<p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have 1887another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p> 1888 1889<p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p> 1890 1891<p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small 1892allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing 1893"$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic 1894is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux 1895filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters 1896we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd), 1897newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in 1898filesystem).</p> 1899 1900<h3>Documentation</h3> 1901 1902<p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html 1903documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently 1904(it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p> 1905 1906<p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup 1907before the pending directory was added.</p> 1908 1909<h3>Test Suite</h3> 1910 1911<p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the 1912testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p> 1913 1914<p>Johan Bergström requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to 1915stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu 1916sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p> 1917 1918<p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat, 1919and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p> 1920 1921<a name="07-07-2014" /><a href="#07-07-2014"><hr><h2><b>July 7, 2014</b></h2></a> 1922<blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: 1923most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many 1924solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely 1925concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd 1926because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were 1927unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1928 1929<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.9.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.9</a> (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1385>commit 1385</a>) is out.</p> 1930 1931<p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include: 1932lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs, 1933killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han, 1934sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh, 1935host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p> 1936 1937<p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending): 1938sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5, 1939fallocate, and nbd-client.</p> 1940 1941<p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps, 1942bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd, 1943login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's 1944still more to do on all of those.)</p> 1945 1946<p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against 1947musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't 1948support that target yet.)</p> 1949 1950<p><b>Documentation:</b></p> 1951 1952<p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with 1953a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the 1954"coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show 1955stopper for incoming 1956contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them 1957during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes 1958the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p> 1959 1960<p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the 1961full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p> 1962 1963<p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is 1964a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more 1965elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option 1966parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p> 1967 1968<p><b>Fixes</b>:</p> 1969 1970<p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default 1971output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported 1972bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init() 1973was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound) 1974had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be 1975there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at 1976the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test 1977in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return 1978success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and 1979ferror() from xprintf().</p> 1980 1981<p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff 1982implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some 1983diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from 1984a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops 1985at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set, 1986which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of 1987chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p> 1988 1989<p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final 1990build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of 1991libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p> 1992 1993<p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes, 1994so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities. 1995So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the 1996setup code to setlocale().</p> 1997 1998<p><b>Upgrades:</b></p> 1999 2000<p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it 2001to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also 2002added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database 2003parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p> 2004 2005<p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making 2006it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum 2007for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other 2008implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p> 2009 2010<p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname), 2011the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get 2012a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p> 2013 2014<p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP 2015command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p> 2016 2017<p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always 2018build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p> 2019 2020<p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so 2021we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0 2022filename" actually works again.</p> 2023 2024<p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd, 2025and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill, 2026groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still 2027working to fix them.</p> 2028 2029<p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a 2030dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new 2031generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte 2032to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's 2033initialized to in toy_init).</p> 2034 2035<p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and 2036use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro 2037contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs 2038decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion 2039bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you 2040cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the 2041first one, the build break is now more informative).</p> 2042 2043<a name="20-04-2014" /><a href="#20-04-2014"><hr><h2><b>April 20, 2014</b></h2></a> 2044<blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer 2045which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks 2046had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as 2047far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to 2048turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2049 2050<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on 2051<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And 2052about time too.</p> 2053 2054<p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h, 2055that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text 2056from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines. 2057There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p> 2058 2059<p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the 2060way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the 2061<a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk, 2062Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p> 2063 2064<p><b>In pending:</b> 2065Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more, 2066groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added 2067ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty. 2068Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold. 2069I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in 2070compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side) 2071and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p> 2072 2073<p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot, 2074cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus 2075in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some 2076work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations 2077documented what their output actually meant).</p> 2078 2079<p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to 2080handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the 2081fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h 2082options (all commands, html output). 2083Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually 2084set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross 2085compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween 2086sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code. 2087Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options 2088to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and 2089allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded 2090tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after 2091that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting. 2092Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of 2093pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified 2094find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on 2095the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions 2096now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with 2097aliasing.</p> 2098 2099<p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you 2100can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same 2101.c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the 2102bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example. 2103i 2104<p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers 2105not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h 2106was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc 2107configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p> 2108 2109<p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig 2110build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily 2111the absolute latest build environment.)</p> 2112 2113<p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid(). 2114xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd 2115and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command, 2116get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and 2117xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into 2118bzcat.c.</p> 2119 2120<p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the 2121help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output. 2122The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about 2123#including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The 2124<a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading 2125of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for 2126good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion 2127at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p> 2128 2129<a name="18-11-2013" /><a href="#18-11-2013"><hr><h2><b>November 18, 2013</b></h2></a> 2130<blockquote><p>"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." - 2131The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2132 2133<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.7.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.7</a> is based on 2134<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p> 2135 2136<p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted 2137reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from 2138pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some 2139cleanup.</p> 2140 2141<p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going 2142into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted 2143dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and 2144an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p> 2145 2146<p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer 2147added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem. 2148William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input 2149(the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug 2150where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault). 2151I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using 2152the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a 2153synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with 2154$CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted 2155a typo in the web page.</p> 2156 2157<p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from 2158bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by 2159--longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal 2160querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a 2161debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply). 2162The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and 2163micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite 2164now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p> 2165 2166<a name="17-09-2013" /><a href="#17-09-2013"><hr><h2><b>September 17, 2013</b></h2></a> 2167<blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number." 2168Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway 2169station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function, 2170and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 2171</blockquote> 2172 2173<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on 2174<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p> 2175 2176<p>This release adds 2177several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han 2178submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and 2179a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted 2180acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p> 2181 2182<p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker). 2183The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah" 2184instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in. 2185Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain 2186other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who 2187heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID 2188namespace support.</p> 2189 2190<h3>Pending</h3> 2191 2192<p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should 2193probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd, 2194dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from 2195Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet), 2196syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar, 2197test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E. 2198M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p> 2199 2200<p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't 2201ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig 2202and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up 2203logger and syslogd...</p> 2204 2205<p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory, 2206but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du, 2207expand, and touch.</p> 2208 2209<h3>Infrastructure</h3> 2210 2211<p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the 2212multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes, 2213OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a 2214command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If 2215you're curious, you can do:</p> 2216 2217<blockquote><pre> 2218make defconfig 2219make 2220mkdir singles 2221for i in $(./toybox) 2222do 2223 echo $i 2224 PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break 2225done 2226</pre> 2227<p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p> 2228</blockquote> 2229 2230<p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this 2231time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p> 2232 2233<p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions 2234not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains 2235functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit). 2236This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p> 2237 2238<p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude 2239logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts 2240should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ; 2241option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E. 2242--color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p> 2243 2244<p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf 2245does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it 2246for us".</p> 2247 2248<p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid(). 2249It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite 2250so much anymore.</p> 2251 2252<p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly 2253linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are 2254using it now.</p> 2255 2256<p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag 2257(-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables) 2258that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept 2259into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler, 2260"-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p> 2261 2262<h3>Bugfixes</h3> 2263 2264<p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to 2265finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f 2266someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once). 2267Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p> 2268 2269<p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that 2270python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks 2271for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer 2272then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p> 2273 2274<p>Ashwini Sharma 2275pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some 2276configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p> 2277 2278<p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and 2279a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p> 2280 2281<p>The new function xexec_optargs() 2282replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs 2283during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p> 2284 2285<p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which 2286didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup 2287between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh 2288command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p> 2289 2290<p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't 2291delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm 2292should now be fixed.</p> 2293 2294<p> 2295<a name="26-07-2013" /><a href="#26-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 26, 2013</b></h2></a> 2296<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git 2297mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the 2298mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches 2299against it and post them to the list.</p> 2300 2301<a name="02-07-2013" /><a href="#02-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 2, 2013</b></h2></a> 2302<blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You 2303should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people 2304like you." - 2305The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2306 2307<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on 2308<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds 2309uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by 2310default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and 2311enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups". 2312Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv". 2313</p> 2314 2315<p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and 2316each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help" 2317and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p> 2318 2319<p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client, 2320logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup. 2321Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up. 2322(It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p> 2323 2324<p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach 2325more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The 2326<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis 2327of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p> 2328 2329<p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected, 2330condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught 2331-l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices. 2332Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking), 2333and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no 2334corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work). 2335Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham 2336fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output 2337field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means 2338to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda 2339moved file permission display code to lib so ls and 2340stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the 2341last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it 2342(ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user). 2343</p> 2344 2345<p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global 2346variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc 2347debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and 2348that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of 2349just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking 2350against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes 2351for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes 2352various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical 2353(breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names). 2354 2355<p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build 2356system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The 2357release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control. 2358Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p> 2359</p> 2360 2361<p><b>LICENSE TWEAK</b>: After <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-March/000794.html>discussion</a> on the mailing list the "2 clause 2362BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first 2363paragraph now says:</p> 2364 2365<blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this 2366software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote> 2367 2368<p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this 2369permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all 2370copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects 2371that consider BSD and GPL compatible have <a href=https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/crypto/aes_generic.c>files with 2372both license notices</a> on them (sometimes at <a href=http://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/shell/ash.c>opposite ends of the file</a> to make the conflict 2373less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate 2374the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p> 2375 2376<p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more 2377or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it 2378BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p> 2379 2380<a name="21-03-2013" /><a href="#21-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 21, 2013</b></h2></a> 2381<p>Video of my ELC talk 2382"<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>" 2383is up on youtube. Related materials include the 2384<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an 2385<a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p> 2386 2387<p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about 2388the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p> 2389 2390<ul> 2391<li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li> 2392 <ul> 2393 <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li> 2394 <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li> 2395 </ul> 2396<li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li> 2397 <ul> 2398 <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li> 2399 </ul> 2400<li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li> 2401<li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li> 2402<li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li> 2403 <ul> 2404 <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li> 2405 <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li> 2406 <ul> 2407 <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li> 2408 <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li> 2409 </ul> 2410 </ul> 2411</ul> 2412</span> 2413 2414 2415<a name="14-03-2013" /><a href="#14-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 14, 2013</b></h2></a> 2416<blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." - 2417The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2418 2419<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on 2420<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding 2421the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p> 2422 2423<p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes 2424getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds. 2425"id -Gn root" should now print root's groups 2426instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under 2427Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you 2428can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p> 2429 2430<p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending". 2431Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig. 2432Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig 2433should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p> 2434 2435<p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries 2436(klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p> 2437 2438<a name="18-01-2013" /><a href="#18-01-2013"><hr><h2><b>January 18, 2013</b></h2></a> 2439<blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2440 2441<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on 2442<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There 2443are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the 2444<a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p> 2445 2446<p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s 2447and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to 2448kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite. 2449Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p> 2450 2451<p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and 2452readlink commands. The segfault in ls 2453happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the 2454default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an 2455extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing 2456a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath() 2457code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test 2458suite checks for it).</p> 2459 2460<p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the 2461error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's 2462still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error 2463bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That 2464means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right 2465error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.) 2466Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG 2467doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with 2468at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic 2469(and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma). 2470dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree 2471functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using 2472libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means 2473it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p> 2474 2475<p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that 2476disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back 2477to -Os by default now.</p> 2478 2479<a name="15-12-2012" /><a href="#15-12-2012"><hr><h2><b>December 15, 2012</b></h2></a> 2480<blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a 2481thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly 2482go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." 2483</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2484 2485<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on 2486<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is 2487just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal 2488Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's 2489a new stable version.</p> 2490 2491<p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch 2492(from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a 2493bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8 2494support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option. 2495Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof. 2496The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports 2497-fenq.</p> 2498 2499<p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library, 2500and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel 2501features we depend on start to drop out).</p> 2502 2503<p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per 2504level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more 2505than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out, 2506or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an 2507earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README, 2508the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory 2509(so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p> 2510 2511<p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist(). 2512Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with 2513full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to 2514stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing 2515it).</p> 2516 2517<p>The open group broke their website so the 2518<a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008 2519now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with 2520pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while 2521I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p> 2522 2523<p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant 2524because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current 2525implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option 2526to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks, 2527but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024 2528filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p> 2529 2530<a name="13-11-2012" /><a href="#13-11-2012"><hr><h2><b>November 13, 2012</b></h2></a> 2531<blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins." 2532- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2533 2534<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on 2535<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p> 2536 2537<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and 2538Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and 2539md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix, 2540unix2dos).</p> 2541 2542<p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by 2543default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name. 2544Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p> 2545 2546<p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into 2547"posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008, 2548the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig 2549and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on). 2550An android directory is planned (see the updated 2551<a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p> 2552 2553<p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's 2554global block are now automatically generated, commands should 2555#define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that 2556command.</p> 2557 2558<p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and - 2559in them, such as switch_root.</p> 2560 2561<p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of 2562uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers. 2563The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite 2564properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's 2565fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage 2566calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp 2567and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces 2568break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite 2569properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's 2570fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib 2571fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary 2572on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending 2573on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in 2574a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking 2575partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts: 2576this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it 2577wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite 2578some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to 2579successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc 2580versions was added to portability.h.</p> 2581 2582<p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a 2583rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All 2584the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards 2585document, where applicable.</p> 2586 2587<p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into 2588a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p> 2589 2590<p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're 2591back now.</p> 2592</span> 2593 2594<a name="23-07-2012" /><a href="#23-07-2012"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2012</b></h2></a> 2595<blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys 2596out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked 2597out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2598 2599<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on 2600<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p> 2601 2602<p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from 2603the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p> 2604 2605<p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed 2606taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han 2607contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a 2608case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p> 2609 2610<p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the 2611<a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and 2612<a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option 2613to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime), 2614fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the 2615corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding 2616glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing 2617pending output on exit.</p> 2618 2619<a name="25-06-2012" /><a href="#25-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 25, 2012</b></h2></a> 2620<blockquote><p>"For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2621 2622<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit 2623<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's 2624mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than 2625x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which 2626now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test 2627suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the 2628musl libc.</p> 2629 2630<p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here 2631it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40 2632pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p> 2633</span> 2634 2635<a name="12-06-2012" /><a href="#12-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 12, 2012</b></h2></a> 2636<blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that 2637he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the 2638wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was 2639muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had 2640always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely 2641the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2642 2643<p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>, 2644so here it is, based 2645on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the 2646statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should 2647actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting 2648that).</p> 2649 2650<p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development 2651doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course. 2652The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which 2653threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit 2654more frequent from here on.</p> 2655 2656<p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory 2657tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that 2658which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p> 2659 2660<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown, 2661chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if 2662you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug 2663on slackware.</p> 2664 2665<p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and 2666mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint, 2667vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups. 2668Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p> 2669 2670<p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell 2671wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove 2672deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and 2673musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got 2674some cleanups and bugfixes.</p> 2675 2676<p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not 2677to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's 2678problematic).</p> 2679 2680<p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now, 2681yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the 2682SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox 2683multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer 2684segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full 2685posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next 2686release.)</p> 2687 2688<p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros 2689for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue 2690is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p> 2691 2692<p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built 2693Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that 2694'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing. 2695(The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted 2696yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before 26971.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p> 2698 2699 2700<a name="03-03-2012" /><a href="#03-03-2012"><hr><h2><b>March 3, 2012</b></h2></a> 2701 2702<blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral 2703without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them. 2704Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking 2705for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p> 2706</p></blockquote> 2707 2708<p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based 2709on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>. This 2710time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt 2711binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p> 2712 2713<p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I 2714have not quite been keeping up.)</p> 2715 2716<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod, 2717insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename. Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln, 2718realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall. Daniel 2719Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests 2720for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp. 2721Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed 2722cross compiling to work more reliably.</p> 2723 2724<p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's 2725code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new 2726code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python 2727bloat-o-meter.)</p> 2728 2729<p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from 2730Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott, 2731more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano 2732Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and 2733optimizations.</p> 2734 2735<p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link, 2736dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months 2737and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p> 2738 2739 2740<a name="12-02-2012" /><a href="#12-02-2012"><hr><h2><b>February 12, 2012</b></h2></a> 2741<blockquote><p> 2742"for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at 2743least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two 2744important respects..."</p> 2745<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 2746 2747<p>Here's the first BSD licensed release, 2748<a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization 2749point than anything particularly useful. 47 commands in a reasonably 2750ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially 2751finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several 2752patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p> 2753 2754<p>More to come...</p> 2755 2756<hr> 2757<a name="15-11-2011" /><a href="#15-11-2011"><hr><h2><b>November 15, 2011</b></h2></a> 2758- Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2 2759clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line 2760implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p> 2761 2762<p>More to come...</p> 2763 2764<hr> 2765 2766<p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p> 2767 2768<!--#include file="footer.html" --> 2769