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="19-06-2017" /><a href="#19-06-2017"><hr><h2><b>June 19, 2017</b></h2></a> 12<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. 13To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.</p> 14<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 15</blockquote> 16 17<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.4.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.4</a> 18(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.4>git commit</a>) 19is out. No new commands this time, but 20<b>chrt</b> and <b>dmesg</b> got promoted out of pending.</p> 21 22<p><u>New features</u>: 23Rob rewrote paste, which should work much better now, and added grep 24-M and -S to match and skip wildcards respectively (useful with -r). 25Elliott's updated dmesg has -T and --color. The file 26command can recognize gzip now, uptime grew -s, date grew %N, env knows - as a first argument 27means -i (posix!) and grew -0, ls defaults to -b 28instead of -q now when there's a tty, and ls has a new -ll option (with 29--full-time as a compatibility synonym) showing nanoseconds and (for some 30reason) timezone. (Why do individual files have timezones?) Elliott added 31"uudecode -o -" support. Illya Kuzmich taught head -v and -q. The cpio 32code no longer adds the "TRAILER!!!" entry by default (initramfs extractor 33doesn't care) without which you can concatenate cpio archives with "cat". 34(Use the new --trailer option if you want the legacy behavior.) 35In pending, fdisk compiles now and tar understands bzip2.</p> 36 37<p><u>Build</u>: 38The "make install_airlock" target now symlinks bc from the host because 39the kernel <a href=https://landley.net/notes-2013.html#28-03-2013>inexplicably</a> 40needs that to build. This was motivated by 41<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a>, which builds under 42a toybox airlock directory.</p> 43 44<p>Lots of work on the test suite, mostly from the Android guys who are now 45running it under Android. This fixed several existing tests that didn't 46pass, made more tests run on a toybox-only system, and so on. The test suite 47infrastructure now has a second testing function, 48"testcmd", which supplies the command name being tested (bypassing 49shell builtins).</p> 50 51<p>Various android build and config fixes, getting closer to being able 52to let android someday use scripts/make.sh instead of generated/* snapshots. 53Also more work into building under android's NDK; not quite there yet 54but much closer. 55Use nproc in scripts/make.sh detect available processors (so you can control the SMP level with taskset). 56Removed the old uClibc compatibility glue, it's been 5 years since their 57<a href=http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2016-December/180102.html>last release</a>.</p> 58 59<p>The new config option TOYBOX_PEDANTIC_ARGS checks arguments when there 60are no arguments, so things like "uptime" no longer silently ignore arguments 61you pass but instead refuse to run.</p> 62 63<p><u>Docs</u>: 64The FAQ now has more than one entry. Commands no longer output the full 65help text for argument errors but instead just say "See %s --help" with the 66command name (in addition to the actual error message). 67Elliott did a big period-ectomy on all the --help text, and 68we cleaned up some tab/space inconsistency. The 69non-html help -a output now has separators with the command name. 70The top/iotop and pkill/pgrep help text now describe a lot more of what 71the commands can do. Twitter's code of conduct page went down so we 72mirrored the text locally.</p> 73 74<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 75Fixed a race condition in ps/top where a process that exited right as we 76read its data returned a different error value than we were expecting (which 77was causing long-running top instances to occasionally exit), 78mount now gives an error if it can't autodetect the filesystem 79type, ps no longer queries the terminal size when output isn't to a tty 80(so "ps -A | cat" doesn't vary), date's chkmktime() was replaced with 81simple range checks for fields (to avoid false positives from things like 82timezones and daylight savings time), removed %s from date's help (we 83didn't implement it, we have @seconds[.nanoseconds] instead), fixed 84zcat's buffer flush logic (which was always failing on files larger 85than 32k), and factor now detects requests for numbers >64 bits and fails 86loudly instead of producing incorrect answers. 87Elliott fixed touch -a/-m (they were backwards), and allowed ':' in 88setprop's property names. Grep now exits with 2 for errors (so -q can 89distinguish "didn't find" from "didn't work"), doesn't stop on symlinks 90that point nowhere (there was an error_exit() that should just be a warning), 91and provides error messages for files we could open but not read.</p> 92 93<p><u>Library</u>: 94New library functions: strend() complements strstart(), minof()/maxof() 95are min/max macros that evalute arguments once and autodetect type (why 96isn't this in libc?), xmmap() checks MAP_FAILED (which is not NULL).</p> 97 98<a name="21-02-2017" /><a href="#21-02-2017"><hr><h2><b>February 21, 2017</b></h2></a> 99<blockquote><p>Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the 100Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention 101away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.</p> 102<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 103 104<p>Despite everything, <a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.3.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.3</a> 105(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.3>git commit</a>) 106is out. The <u>new commands</u> this time are <b>ftpget</b>, <b>ftpput</b>, <b>microcom</b>, and <b>ascii</b>.<p> 107 108<p>We also had two command _demotions_ out of defconfig: 109<b>hostid</b> got moved to toys/example and 110switched to "default n" because despite <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/gethostid.html>still being in posix</a> 111the concept of a unique 32 bit number identifying a system is something 112Linux outgrew about the time Pauline Middelink wrote the first IP 113Masquerading code. And Elliott did a complete rewrite of <b>dmesg</b> introducing 114two codepaths that I didn't get a chance to unify and didn't want to 115hold up the release for, so that's back in pending.</p> 116 117<p><u>New features</u>: Rob added units to <b>find</b> -atime and friends 118(with the legacy -amin alias). Elliott added color and -w to dmesg, fallocate 119-o, and improved file's ELF parsing. Steve Muckle added -d and finit_module 120support to modprobe. Rob and Elliott tweaked the 121ps/top display format a bit more (extending the USER field from 8 to 18 chars 122and putting + at the end of string fields that got truncated). 123df -a isn't entirely new, but wasn't documented and needed a bugfix.</p> 124 125<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 126Last release broke oneit because -c didn't get moved to xopen_stdio() (oops). 127Rob and Elliott simultaneously spotted ps padding each line to 99999 128chars when there's no tty (serial console or adb); now it pads to 80 in 129that case but also switches on -w to avoid field truncation. The "tty" 130field also sometimes had trailing debris (that's fixed now). And "top" was 131endlessly redrawing with out tty because receipt of the ANSI size probe 132results would set SIGWINCH, and handling that sent another ansi probe. (Sigh.) 133And while we're there, replace "ADDR" with "BIT" in ps -l so there are 134more than 4 chars left for the "CMD" field on 64 bit systems.</p> 135 136<p>Izabera pointed out that split -b and -l can't mix, and suggested seq should 137multiply to avoid accumulating rounding errors from repeated fractional 138increments. Wang Xiao Jian fixed a bug in sort -k. 139Elliott let getprop use the @ character in property names, and 140Dimitry Ivanov removed the name length limit for system properties. 141Elliott also improved some error reporting and improved top -H's display 142of thread names. 143 144<p>Josh Gao pointed out that recursive operations on . and .. could be ignored 145in chmod -R (and the resulting generic fix to dirtree_notdotdot() fixed 146it in several other places).</p> 147 148<p>Justin Cormack caught tar producing a warning to stdout that screwed up 149"tar c" to stdout. 150Rob fixed an option parsing bug (where switching off a --longopt in menuconfig 151confused the parser), and another one where an option excluding itself 152(ala "abc[-ab][!abc]" with "command -a -b") would segfault.</p> 153 154<p>There's some sort of gcc stack over-optimization bug where musl-libc's 155version of vfork() doesn't get marked with attribute(returns_twice) so 156stack varabiles in the same function after that get semi-randomly overwritten 157when the optimizer decides to reclaim the space. So add the attribute 158to the function the XVFORK() wrapper macro calls. (It's a nommu thing.)</p> 159 160<p>Fixed a couple variable size mismatch bugs that were only tested on 64 bit 161(printf %x 64) or only tested on 32 bit (modprobe), removed some 162unnecessary casts in stat.</p> 163 164<p>Continuing attempts to build under Android NDK brought up that posix 165defines the global 'stdout' as a macro, which older versions of bionic 166turned into an array member, but a function was using it as an argument 167name. (This worked in the AOSP build because it only builds against current 168bionic, where there's a global 'stdout'.)</p> 169 170<p>Several commits argued with clang's warning generation, eventually 171settling on a variant of __attribute__((__shut_up__)).</p> 172 173<p>Android should no longer give spurious error messages 174when you "ps -A | head" about EPIPE on output. (Older versions of bionic 175set an error handler on SIGPIPE, but it shouldn't do that now. More recent 176versions of adb set the SIGPIPE handler to SIGIGN instead of SIGDFL, 177leading to write returning an error message instead of silently killing 178the program. So we set it back to the default.)</p> 179 180<p><u>Docs</u>: 181Removed website link to the gmane archive (which didn't survive gmane's 182change of ownership). The FAQ now answers a _second_ question. (Woo!) 183Some roadmap updates.</p> 184 185<p><u>Build tweaks</u>: 186Upgraded "make install_airlock" target to only warn about missing 187commands (unless $PEDANTIC is set) when it sets up the hermetic build 188path. (The plan is still to implement everything but the toolchain 189binaries in toybox, but in the meantime we're symlinking other stuff from 190the $HOST that isn't ready yet. See 191<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> for an example using 192this.)</p> 193 194<p>Elliott and Rob continue to poke at building toybox with Android's NDK, 195but it's a work in progress (<a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-December/008767.html>thread</a>). Various changes 196removing libcutils dependencies and adding an selinux dependency to getprop 197are fallout from this.</p> 198 199<p>Cross-compiling from Macs needs to use "gsed" instead of apple's 200version, so teach the build to use that name if it exists in the $PATH. 201If you try to build without running config first, you should get better 202error reporting now. Added a workaround for Centos' broken "which" command 203producing output when it _can't_ find a name in the $PATH.</p> 204 205<p><u>Library</u>: 206The new dirtree flag DIRTREE_PROC skips non-numeric entries so things 207like ps and top can scan /proc more efficiently.</p> 208 209<a name="21-10-2016" /><a href="#21-10-2016"><hr><h2><b>October 21, 2016</b></h2></a> 210<blockquote><p>Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat, 211we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your 212own problem.</p><p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 213 214<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.2</a> 215(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.2>git commit</a>) 216is out.</p> 217 218<p>During this development cycle, Elliott Hughes <a href=http://androidbackstage.blogspot.com/2016/07/episode-53-adb-on-adb.html>got interviewed 219on the ADB podcast</a> 220and 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>). 221Both talk about toybox and many other things. 222The web page also grew a new <a href=faq.html>FAQ page</a>, currently with 223just the one.</p> 224 225<p>New comands added to defconfig are <b>tunctl</b>, 226<b>log</b>, <b>start</b>, <b>stop</b>, and <b>sendevent</b>. 227The commands <b>file</b> and <b>netstat</b> got promoted out of pending. 228Pending added <b>chrt</b>, <b>setfattr</b>, and <b>getfattr</b>, and saw 229a lot of cleanups to diffstat and dd but not enough to promote them to 230defconfig yet. A new toys/net directory was added, moving ifconfig, netcat, 231netstat, rfkill, and tunctl there so far.</p> 232 233<p><b>Upgrades</b>: All commands now parse --version when they understand 234--help, but "true" and "false" should now ignore their arguments entirely. 235We taught stat to handle "%12x" and "%.12x" printf-style escapes, which 236apparently other versions do. The ifconfig output now shows the interface's 237device driver. Added patch -d and --dry-run, wc can now do -cm together, 238find has a NOP -noleaf so scripts that use that don't break, add -c to md5sum 239and sha1sum. Elliott taught ps to treat extra aguments as additional -p 240pids, implemented xxd -s, did a number of upgrades to file (added -HL, 241support for ar files, improved ELF support to report android API level 242and stripped/not stripped and it no longer prints a guessed build ID type). 243Elliott also added optional build-time support for using openssl's 244assembly-optimized md5sum/sha1sum implementations (leading to a new 245<a href=design.html>design</a> policy on shared libraries).</p> 246 247<p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Too many fixes to "ps" and "touch" to list, from both 248Elliott and Rob. Rob taught sed to handle s/[[:space:]/]// type sequences 249properly, switched grep to a better 250workaround 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, 251made du max out at 2 terabytes instead of 2 gigabytes on 32-bit systems 252(it was always designed to, but was missing a typecast), 253fixed the option parsing infrastructure (config options that remove command 254line options got the placeholders wrong), fix to printf for printing 255octal digits and handling the (posix-mandated) difference between %b and 256non-%b octal output, reading from "-" no longer closes stdin when done, 257netcat -L works with nommu (although it may need more portability work), 258and you can now "make test_scankey" if you want to. Several commands 259(stat, makedeves, chgrp, cp, find) handled user name lookup failure badly 260(stat was segfaulting if you interrogated a file belonging to a nonexistent 261user, "chown 12345 file" errored out if you didn't have that user 262in /etc/passwd... now they should all print/accept the number when 263appropriate). "LC_ALL=C ls -Cs --color" produces the same output 264as other versions (two spaces padding, -k hardwired on).<p> 265 266<p>Kyungsik Lee fixed a bug 267in cp (readlink() doesn't actually null terminate the string it reads in), 268Elliott Hughes made pgrep/pkill return success/failure, fixed trailing 269whitespace in netstat, fixed a SMACK symbol conflict due to linux/xattr.h 270changing, fixed ls -sh, and added a lot of 271stuff to the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap page</a>. 272Izabera pointed out cmp -l and -s can't be selected at the same time, 273that timeout was never actually checking -v, that ls should default to -q 274when output is to a tty, and that "file -" would sometimes try to open "-" 275instead of stdin. 276Usischev Yury pointed out a use after free error, and that id shouldn't 277call exit() directly. Matthias Urhahn pointed out that stat(2) returns 278hardwired 512-byte units, so stat.c was wrong. David Hedges pointed out 279that route could only handle 10 character interface names when the kernel 280can do 15 (it's still in pending for a reason, but fixed). Evgenii 281Stepanov found and helped diagnose one of the more subtle ps bugs fixed 282this time around.</p> 283 284<p>Calling "make test_blah" no longer causes make to error out if the last 285test fails (and thus returns a nonzero error code). 286Building single commands and the multiplexer used to require a "make clean" 287between them (because they had different config files both of which were older 288than generated/config.h so it didn't get rebuilt; now it just always 289rebuilds it).</p> 290 291<p>The defconfig build is now slightly less broken on older centos versions 292(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> 293 294<p>Several commands were over-using xprintf(), which flushes its output 295to check for error (something you only need to do maybe once per line, 296and even then maybe only in loops because xexit() flushes and checks 297ferror() for you and adjusts the exit code if we wrote stuff to stdout 298that couldn't be printed). Lots of little flushes are inefficient, 299so most things can use normal printf(). (Retransmission 300of short writes is presumably libc's problem since it's buffering the 301output and all.)</p> 302 303<p><b>Library:</b> 304New library functions readlink0() and readlinkat0() which properly null 305terminates the symlink value (which the stock libc function inexplicably 306doesn't). 307The new do_lines() function interates reading lines from a filehandle 308and calling a function on each line. 309New function pollinate() factoring out netcat's poll() loop so things 310like telnet can use it. 311New functions getusername() and getgroupname() return a 312char * given a uid/gid (and return a string representation of the number 313if the lookup fails), and xgetpwnamid/xgetgrnamid were renamed to 314xgetuid/xgetgid and now return an integer instead of a struct (also helping 315handle lookup failures, you can still return the uid/get for "12345").</p> 316 317<p>Switched atolx() to use long long internally. 318Renamed xopen() to xopen_stdio() and made a new xopen() that never returns 319stdin, stdout, or stderr (duping /dev/null into the filehandles as necessary). 320New function xopenro() opens a file read only with one less argument, and 321understands that "-" means stdin. New flag WARN_ONLY tells these functions 322to just print a warning on failure, and return -1 instead of exiting. 323Misc new functions like openro() which defaults to the WARN_ONLY behavior 324and notstdio() which dup()s a filehandle up beyond stdin/out/err backfilling 325with /dev/null as necessary. The WARN_ONLY flag let us remove the failok 326argument from loopfiles().</p> 327 328<p>New TOYFLAG_NOHELP disables --help processing (which "true" and "false" 329should not do).</b> 330 331<p>The test suite now has NOSPACE=1 to ignore whitespace (using diff -b to 332check results), which helps TEST_HOST pass the same tests as toybox. 333Fixes to chattr and date tests. It also has a new variable $C with the 334absolute path to the command being tested (bypassing shell builtins), 335and a function testcmd() which is just like testing() except it prepends 336the command name ($C) to the test command line as well as the test 337description.</p> 338 339<a name="02-06-2016" /><a href="#02-06-2016"><hr><h2><b>June 2, 2016</b></h2></a> 340<blockquote><p>When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but 341highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic 342analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental 343signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's 344brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows 345quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of 346liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.</p> 347<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 348 349<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.1</a> 350(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.1>git commit</a>) 351is out. (Yes, I forgot to update the --version string, but I already 352uploaded the <a href=downloads/binaries/0.7.1>binaries</a>.)</p> 353 354<p>The website has https support now, you can "make cat ps ls" 355to get standalone commands (and "make list list_pending" to see what's 356available), and a whole lot of bugfixes and new options to existing 357commands.</p> 358 359<h2>New Commands</h2> 360<p>Rob implemented <b>ulimit</b>. In pending, Elliott Hughes implemented 361file. and Lipi Lee implemented a simple wget. (Pending also had minor 362cleanups to more and lsof, but no promotions this time around.)</p> 363 364<h2>New Options</h2> 365<p>Izabera implemented env -u, suggested adding seq -w, made factor 366use full unsigned 64 bit math even on 32 bit platforms, pointed out base64 367-w0 should disable wrapping, and sped up wc -c. 368Elliott Hughes added mount -o relatime, xxd -p -r, and od -w. 369Sameer Pradhan (or possibly Bilal Qureshi) suggested adding stat -tL -c %m%t%T. 370Tom Cherry added getprop -Z. Paul Barker added hostname -b and -F. 371Rob added ls -b, made ls -q work with utf8, 372made sed -f - read from stdin, and added top -O (like ps -O).</p> 373 374<p>Elliott and Rob <b>added Thread support to ps and top</b>, 375with -o TID, TNAME. We also added -o PCY (android scheduling policy), 376-o BIT (process is 32 or 64 bit), and -o TNAME now shows the parent 377command name for threads.</p> 378 379<h2>Documentation</h2> 380 381<p>Rob added the sed invocations to convert tabs/spaces and back to 382design.html. Isaac Dunham updated hexedit's help text. 383Jakob Flierl pointed out a broken URL in the README.</p> 384 385<p>Rob also redid the naming scheme of sed's pattern manipulation code to 386remove the gratuitous references to Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series, since it 387was confusing people.</p> 388 389<h2>Bugfixes</h2> 390 391<p>Grep -H and -n should now work properly with -ABC. Andy Chu pointed out an 392out of bounds access for zero length lines in rev, fixed a buffer overflow 393in diff -r, and fixed operator precedence in expr (although Rob is rewriting 394chunks of expr so toysh can use its plumbing for $(( )) ). 395Patrick Ohly fixed the too-aggressive suid permission dropping logic. 396Josh Gao fixed a segfault when find -iname got no argument, and 397made tail -f work right with just one file argument. 398Tom Marshall cleaned up tar's long filename support and improved 399the tar tests, and reported another find bug (with -iname -o -iname not 400tracking copy lifetimes properly) that got fixed.</p> 401 402<p>Elliott Hughes fixed wc -c to not trust zero length files to actually be 403zero length (/proc does that), fixed "mount -o rw,remount /system" on 404Android, removed trailing spaces on ps -o cmdline, fixed pkill -9 and 405the corresponding tests, made "insmod -" work, fixed top -b and tail -NUM, 406pointed out that ps shouldn't trim numeric fields for display size limits, 407and added some more 408explicit "sort" calls to make pipelines so build tempfiles are easier to cache. 409Rob <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/32b3587af261>fixed an insane sed thing</a> the perl 5.22 build was doing. 410Fixed mount -o to properly pass in leftover string data, and 411<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 412to fix some bitrot in the kernel NFS driver's string parsing attached 413to that message).</p> 414 415<p>George Burgess IV corrected some variable types in traceroute. 416Base64 now wraps == properly. Fixed two bzcat segfaults reported by 417John Regehr. Andy Chu found a segfault in "sed -e 'c\'" with no trailing 418line, and implemented mv -n and cp -n. The cyanogenmod guys pointed out that 419cp -a shouldn't complain if a non-root user can't chown, and we added 420the output path to cp -r error messages while we were there (before was just 421the filename).</p> 422 423<p>Samuel Holland fixed blkid's handling of vfat labels, and 424fixed a segfault when basename was passed an empty string and an empty 425suffix. Davis Mosenkovs fixed touch -t seconds parsing. 426Rob fixed a bunzip bug reported by John Regehr (the bad CRC 427error message was printing a NUL argument).</p> 428 429<p>Not all of the commands build standalone, but more of them do now; 430scripts/single.sh can now build a "mv" that isn't actually "cp". 431The dependencies are more granualr, so "make top; make ps" no longer 432produces a broken ps that ignores -A (because ps.o wasn't getting rebuilt 433even though top had the FLAG macros for -A zeroed).</p> 434 435<h2>Build</h2> 436<p>Rob added a <b>warning when building commands out of 437pending</b>. (The pending directory is full of code that hasn't been 438properly vetted. Use at your own risk.)</p> 439 440<p><b>New build targets let you build individual commands by name</b>, ala 441"make ls cat ps", and you can run the test suite for each standalone 442command with "make test_ls" and such. 443"make list" shows all such standalone commands in defconfig, and 444"make list_pending" shows unfinished commands from toys/pending 445("make list list_pending" shows both together). "make clean" now deletes 446these filenames at the top level, and the corresponding unstripped files 447live in the directory generated/unstripped.</p> 448 449<p>Nicholas Boichat suggested switching make.sh to use $! for process 450enumeration during parallel builds (which is both more efficient and more 451portable), and suggested shell builtin replacements for wc/awk/sed so the 452build loop has fewer forks now.</p> 453 454<p>Lots of work on the test suite, much of it due to Andy Chu. It now 455consistently prints the name of the command being tested at the start of each 456test (and the common infrastructure does that, not each individual test), and 457"make tests" actually runs all the available tests now. 458Seperated pgrep and pkill tests, split lsattr/chattr, added fstype and base64 459tests. The "tests/files" directory now collects files for tests to 460use, with blkid, bzcat, and utf8 subdirectories: the $FILES variable 461gives a path to it, so "$FILES/blkid/ext2.bz2" and so on. 462The testsuite now has test files with 3 different types of "not utf8 output" 463sequences that require escaping, plus some combining character torture 464tests, direction reversals, and so on.</p> 465 466<p>Added dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK to various pending commands that need 467nommu conversion (which should fix the allyesconfig build).</p> 468 469<p>Static builds with selinux should work again.</p> 470 471<h2>Library</h2> 472 473<p>New bufgetgrgid() and bufgetpwuid() functions cache previous lookup info 474rather than repeatedly traversing /etc/passwd and /etc/group (which is slow). 475Added xpipe() to lib to catch pipe creation failure. 476The HELP_ macros generated by config2help.c now use a capital prefix 477to avoid collicing with help_exit() and such.</p> 478 479<p>The dirtree infrastructure got a cleanup pass in preparation for adding 480infinite recursion depth support (needed by rm -r), updated the 481<a href=code.html#ib_dirtree>documentation</a> to describe the new 482semantics (removing dirtree_start() and adding dirtree_flagread()). 483Now dirtree_recurse() takes the new dirfd as an argument.</p> 484 485<p>Split out _xexit() from xexit() and let sigatexit() set multiple 486callbacks.</p> 487 488<p>For years the man pages have said to #include <sys/types.h> to get 489major/minor/makedev but now that glibc 490<a href=https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-11/msg00253.html>has vowed 491to break existing programs</a> and replace it with another nonstandard header 492not in posix or lsb, we added our own functions to lib/ to do the transform 493ourselves (based on what the kernel actually expects).</p> 494 495<h2>Portability</h2> 496 497<p>Debian unstable started needing an extra header #include for some reason, and 498although printf("%.*s", INT_MAX, s) worked fine on Ubuntu 12.04 it 499didn't on 14.04, so added a workaround for that. Typecast a printf because 500wchar_t isn't a rigidly defined size. RLIMIT_RTTIME was 501added to the kernel in 2008 but you can't expect uClibc to have noticed yet, 502nor did it #define MS_RELATIME (added in 2006), or prlimit (2010)... 503(Given the improvements in musl and bionic, uClibc support may be dropped 504in a future release.) Given that the xattr functions were added during 505linux 2.5, we can #include its header unconditionally.</p> 506 507<p>Renamed basename_r() to something else to avoid conflicting with freebsd's 508libc, and both scripts/install.h and scripts/config2help.c no longer include 509toys.h (to make cross-compiling from systems we don't run on easier).</p> 510 511<p>Debian bug 635570 did something unspeakably nonportable, depending on 512"sed -e 'a\'" (with no next line of the pattern, so an unterminated 513continuation) to add a newline to the last line of input if and only if 514that last line of the input didn't have a newline, and to take no other 515action. This is well into "depending on a bug" territory, but we implemented 516it because otherwise Debian's install broke. (Of course this behavior 517is undocumented, non-obvious, and doesn't really make logical sense.)</p> 518 519<p>CONFIG_TOYBOX_NORECURSE now disables the stack measuring logic (which 520was giving some "security" code fits). Also we typecast pointers to (long) 521before comparing them to avoid spurious compiler "optimizations" that 522break the code.</p> 523 524<a name="02-02-2016" /><a href="#02-02-2016"><hr><h2><b>February 2, 2016</b></h2></a> 525<blockquote><p>"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that 526quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with 527you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." 528- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 529 530<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.0</a> 531(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.0>git commit</a>) 532is out.</p> 533 534<p>The new commands in defconfig are <b>iotop</b>, <b>top</b>, <b>pgrep</b>, 535and <b>pkill</b> 536(most replacing corresponding versions from pending). Added grep -ABC, 537swapon -d (discard), mkswap -L (label) and UUID support, and find -delete. 538Izabera added free -h and unshare -f. Josh Gao implemented tail -f. 539Jose Bollo submitted cp --preserve=context,attr. Kylie McClain added 540mktemp -u.</p> 541 542<p>In pending there's the start of a vi command, and Sameer Pradhan contributed 543a new dhcp6. This cycle saw several rounds of route cleanup and a little dhcp 544cleanup, but neither are complete yet. Lipi Lee did some cleanup to netstat.c 545and Elliott Hughes removed warnings from traceroute.</p> 546 547<p>Lots of updates to ps: several new -o options, -k (--sort) -O and -M, 548improved compatibility with Android's historical behavior, and 549extensive internal code cleanup (including the removal of all 550the magic constants).</p> 551 552<h3><b>Website</b></h3> 553 554<p>Dreamhost restored the <a href="#12-21-2015">missing 11 months</a> 555to the mailing list archive, in the process deleting the month after 556that. Now they've asked if I have mbox files archiving the new 557gap (between December 20, 2015 to January 21, 2016, and presumably they 558could also fill in the gap from December 14, 2014 to January 3, 2015 that's 559been there since the last time they did this), 560but due to some gmail filtering I've 561<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2012.html#15-10-2012>never 562been able to disable</a>, my copy of those files is spread among 3 different 563mbox files I'd have to sort/filter/collate. (It's on the todo list.)</p> 564 565<p>Added a code of conduct to the README (we're 566<a href=https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/code-of-conduct>borrowing twitter's</a>) because somebody 567made it necessary.</p> 568 569<h3><b>Bugfixes</b></h3> 570<p>Fixed another sed bug where any ] right after [ was skipped (not just the 571first one in the range, so [[] didn't terminate). Fixed sort -f and added test cases. 572Assume 80 columns in "ls -m | cat", ls -L is no longer backwards, 573and ls of files with no paths no longer uses an uninitialized (zero) dirfd. 574Several bugfixes 575to find (Gilad Arnold fixed -perm, Daniel K. Levy fixed "find . -exec echo {}", 576and while we're there I fixed find --prune, made "find . -execdir 577echo {} + -execdir ls {} +" work, and ripped out the environment size 578measuring code that checked for a 128k limit removed back in linux 2.6.22). 579Elliott Hughes fixed the date command's parsing of 4 digit 580years and documented the %s escape, fixed hwclock -u, and pointed out 581that runcon needs to exec to do its job (not recursively call another 582command_main() in the same process). Tom Marshall reported that blkid was 583handling ext2 wrong. Mike Moreton corrected cpio extraction's uid and gid 584values, and added a --no-preserve-owner option. Fixed the SUID permission 585dropping logic (which was a bit over-zealous, preventing some commands from 586running at all).</p> 587 588<p>I'm told that debian-testing broke its libc so the nsenter build breaks, 589but my attempts to install the debian-testing network cd image under 590qemu keep breaking. Maybe someday they'll fix it enough I can actually 591reproduce the problem. (Debootstrap under unbuntu builds an ubuntu-flavored 592chroot in which toybox builds fine.)</p> 593 594<h3><b>Documentation</b></h3> 595<p>Rewrite of the about.html page, tweaks to design.html, and a re-triage of 596sbase in roadmap.html. Update to mkstatus.py to collate multiple span 597tags with the same id, resulting in a larger status.html page (which 598was previously ignoring some commands in the roadmap).</p> 599 600<p>Expanded the defconfig/allyesconfig/allnoconfighelp text in "make help" 601to explain what they're for.</p> 602 603<h3><b>infrastructure</b></h3> 604<ul> 605<li><p>Expanded toys.optargs to 64 bits so a command can have more than 32 options.</p></li> 606<li><p>Added NOEXIT() wrapper to turn xwrap() functions into warning versions 607using the existing longjump(toys.rebound) infrastructure.</p></li> 608<li><p>Renamed dirtree->data to dirfd and stopped storing symlink length 609into it (this fixed a bug where following symlinks to directories 610didn't give a valid directory filehandle, noticeable with ls -Z).</p></li> 611<li><p>New TAGGED_ARRAY() infrastructure generates index and bitmask macros 612for arrays of structures starting with a name string.</p></li> 613<li><p>New lib/linestack.c for utf8 fontmetrics (draw_str() and utf8len() 614and so on), and for tracking multiple lines of text 615(vi, less, shell history) that need wordwrapping and scrolling up/down.</p></li> 616<li><p>Upgrades to lib/interestingtimes.c: scan_key() now has a timeout 617in miliseconds and recognizes more sequences including ANSI 618window size probes. New utf8 test files in tests/files/utf8 including 619sequence reversing, stacked combining chars, and all three types of 620unprintable sequences (low ascii <32 ala ^X, invalid utf8 sequences ala 621<AB><CD>, and invalid unicode code points ala U+1234).</p></li> 622<li><p>More comma handling code in lib.c: comma_args()</p></li> 623<li><p>Added error_msg_raw() to shut up fortify's endless static checking false 624positives.</p></li> 625<li><p>readfileat() can now realloc() in a loop to read long files 626("zcat | insmod" needed it).</p></li> 627</ul> 628 629<h3><b>Roadmap</b></h3> 630<p>We're getting close to having a self-hosting development environment 631using toybox for the command line. The remaining busybox commands in 632<a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>Aboriginal Linux</a> are:</p> 633 634<blockquote><p><b> 635awk bunzip2 bzcat bzip2 dd diff expr fdisk ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip gzip 636less ping route sh sha512sum tar test tr unxz vi wget xzcat zcat 637</b></p></blockquote> 638 639<p>And the remaining non-busybox commands in Aboriginal Linux's build/host 640directory (from the distcc, genext2fs, e2fsprogs, zlib, and squashfs packagesi) 641are:</p> 642 643<blockquote><p><b> 644mke2fs fsck.ext2 resize2fs distcc genext2fs unsquashfs distccd mksquashfs tune2fs 645</b></p></blockquote> 646 647<p>Squashfs and distcc are probably out of scope for toybox, but mke2fs, 648fsck.ext2, resize2fs, genext2fs, and tune2fs should all be added to the 649above "busybox" replacement list.</p> 650 651<p>Remind me to include this countdown in future releases. Once they've all 652been replaced, the next goal is <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>building AOSP under itself</a>.</p> 653 654<p>See the full <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> and <a href=status.html>status</a> 655pages for more details.</p> 656 657<a name="12-21-2015" /><a href="#12-21-2015"><hr><h2><b>December 21, 2015</b></h2></a> 658 659<p>Yes, 11 months have gone missing from the mailing list web archive.</p> 660 661<p>Yesterday evening Dreamhost's mailman server went down (timing out trying 662to connect). I poked them about it, they 663<a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/678781271670149121>blamed 664DNS</a>, I explained that the hang was _after_ the DNS lookup and 665entered the dig info into the trouble ticket showing the IPs the DNS 666queries were returning, they reinstalled the server at that IP from what I 667assume was their most recent backup, and that's how 11 months of messages 668vanished out of the archive.</p> 669 670<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 671can do. <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>Last time</a> 672this sort of thing <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>happened</a> 673we went back and forth for months, so I added a link to a backup web 674archive (in the nav bar on the left) that isn't controlled by dreamhost, 675and thus doesn't gratuitously lose data on a regular basis. (I note 676the earlier hole in Dreamhost's archive was never fixed either. That 677was data never getting archived, this is a year's worth of data that 678was in the archive until yesterday vanishing after the fact.)</p> 679 680<p>If you're wondering why the <a href=http://lists.landley.net>top level</a> 681list page has been "temporarily disabled" for multiple years now... you'd have 682to ask Dreamhost. I know I have. More than a dozen times.</p> 683 684<a name="03-11-2015" /><a href="#03-11-2015"><hr><h2><b>November 3, 2015</b></h2></a> 685<blockquote><p>"Alright," said Ford. "How would you react if I said that I'm 686not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity 687of Betelgeuse?" Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way. "I don't know," he 688said, taking a pull of beer. "Why - do you think it's the sort of thing you're 689likely to say?" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 690 691<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.1</a> 692(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.1>git commit</a>) 693is out.</p> 694 695<p>We have a new <b>ps</b> command with all the -o fields posix wants (although 696it doesn't accept BSD non-dash option syntax yet), and <b>bunzip2</b> (not just 697bzcat but the proper extract-in-place command). 698Sameer Pradhan added <b>hostid</b> and <b>fsync</b>. 699Elliott Hughes added <b>flock</b>. 700 701<p>The people waiting for <b>human readable number support</b> (du -hH, ls -h, 702and so on) can thank Elliott Hughes for implementing it. (Our output doesn't 703exactly match others' because we our "binary" mode will say 1.0G instead of 7041024M, which is a bug in the other one we didn't emulate.)</p> 705 706<p>The other big news is <b>nommu support</b>, tested on the new 707<a href=http://nommu.org/jcore>jcore</a> processor but presumaby working 708on any nommu system. A few commands don't support nommu yet, but those 709are disabled by dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK in menuconfig when building 710for nommu. The roadmap now has a large section analyzing the uClinux 711project (note that <a href=http://nommu.org>nommu.org</a> is slowly replacing 712<a href=http://uclinux.org>uclinux.org</a> as the standard repository of 713all knowledge and wisdom about nommu. The old site <a href=#12-02-2012>contains 714much that is apocryphal</a>, or at least wildly inaccurate, and the new one 715is trying to improve on that).</p> 716 717<p>Both "make change" and scripts/single.sh (for building standalone commands 718without the multiplexer logic) now use the top level .config 719for toybox global settings such as Linux Security Blanket Module selection, 720(so make defconfig before change now).</p> 721 722<p>Documentation updates to the <a href=code.html>code</a> and 723<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> pages.</p> 724 725<h3>pending</h3> 726 727<p>In the pending directory Sameer Pradhan added tftp, 728and Elliott Hughes sent lsof. Isaac Dunham upgraded mdev, 729reboot, init, login, and modprobe, and fixed a distro-specific build break in 730scripts/mkflags.h. Elliott Hughes and Lipi Lee made netstat -p handle 731command lines longer than 21 characters, and Elliott fixed netstat -e and 732some build warnings. Yeongdeok Suh fixed a warning in dhcpd. 733I started cleanup on pgrep/pkill.</p> 734 735<h3>Command updates, bugfixes, and infrastructure</h3> 736 737<p>The multiplexer's "command not found" error exit is now 127, so now you can't 738distinguish between a command not being found in the multiplexer and 739the multiplexer itself not being found by the shell, because people wanted 740that for some reason.</p> 741 742<p>Elliott Hughes made date reject invalid dates rather 743than set the clock to something weird (setting the clock 100 years into the 744future makes most Linux desktops surprisingly unhappy, and ntpdate won't fix it 745either), fixed several ls -l display issues (user/group field ordering, 746make user/group/lsmcontext left aligned), did the aforementioned 747extensive work on human readable number output, fixed ionice's default 748class, fixed a mv overwrite bug, made df's columns auto-size, added 749--ppid and -Z to ps, and teamed up with Daniel K. Levy to fix 750a segfault in find's handling of -newer -group or -user.</p> 751 752<p>Hyejin Kim added stat -c %T support. Colin Cross worked 753on vmstat fixing 754a header printing bug and calculating the bi and bo columns in the right 755units. Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra 756newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed. 757Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain 758pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax. 759Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows 760all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p> 761 762<p>Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra 763newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed. 764Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain 765pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax. 766Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows 767all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p> 768 769<p>Two large thinko fixes in oneit: -3 was always enabled (which would 770eventually block if the child never read the exiting PID numbers from its file 771descriptor #3 until the pipe filled up), and the signal handlers weren't 772set up right (for requesting semi-graceful halt/poweroff/reboot). 773Calling install without a mode is now 0755, and install -g 0 no longer clashes 774with cp --preserve. Better error message for ls -r on unreadable 775directories, and ls -Z now uses O_PATH (with the /proc/self/fd/%d 776workaround for kernel stupidity as necessary).</p> 777 778<p>Date now understands @unixtime[.fraction] and uses -D for 779the set-side format (matching busybox's extension for this). The seq -f 780string now checks that it's got exactly one %f escape with the correct 781attributes (and a whole bunch of test cases for it). Fixed a bug 782in od that screwed up the position indicator on arm and mips. 783In stat the d/h units moved from %d %D to the default string. 784And patch can now correctly apply hunks with trailing context to the start of 785the file.</p> 786 787<p>The prompt argument moved out of yesno() (the caller can print the prompt 788themselves). Replaced toys.exithelp with help_exit(). Added new 789XVFORK() macro, and xpopen_both() calls /proc/self/exe when passed 790a NULL argv (see cpio -p for example usage). Replaced toys.recurse 791with toys.stacktop so the recurse or re-exec decision is now based 792on bytes of stack space used. Marked a bunch of command-local functions 793static.</p> 794 795<p>New additions to lib/ include strlower(), xconnect(), and the 796aforementioned help_exit(). 797The testsuite now has some infrastructure tests based on "example" 798commands such as toys/examples/test_human_readable.c. 799The login command finally got a long-overdue cleanup (it's one of the 800commands that predate the "pending" directory but were part of the reason 801for it). Hexedit had an 802uninitialized variable (of course gcc didn't spot it, it was too busy 803warning about "may be used uninitialized but never actually is" variables).</p> 804 805<p>Tweaked makefile so 806"make CROSS_COMPILE=prefix-" (as well as "CROSS_COMPILE=prefix- make", 807which still works). Toybox is now installed chmod -w so broken installers 808(like the bunzip2 package's) that try to overwrite existing binaries won't 809knock out the whole of toybox. 810GCC 5.2.0 stopped being able to compile Linux 2.6.12's kconfig, but 811we added a workaround. You can now build uptime without utmpx.h. 812Alejandro Joya pointed out that enabling smack required smack on the host 813as well as target when cross compiling, which is now fixed.</p> 814 815<p>Note: toybox can autodetect nommu support when building with a uClibc 816toolchain 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>, 817but <a href=http://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>with musl-libc</a> 818you'll have to enable CONFIG_TOYBOX_MUSL_NOMMU_IS_BROKEN to work around the 819fact they provide a non-functional fork() implementation that always returns 820-ENOSYS, to prevent you from compile-time probing for nommu support when 821cross-compiling. Unfortunately "preventing you from probing" seems to be 822an explicit policy with musl, they also don't provide an "#ifdef __MUSL__" 823because their library is perfect and you're only ever allowed to work around 824other people's bugs, not theirs. So we have to use menuconfig to manually 825enable musl-specific bug workarounds.</p> 826 827<a name="23-07-2015" /><a href="#23-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2015</b></h2></a> 828<p>I recreated the <a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>0.6.0 source tarball</a> 829(new sha1sum 08fb1c23f520c25a15f262a8a95ea5b676a98d54) 830because I forgot to add --prefix to the git archive command when I updated 831my release script from mercurial, so the files weren't in an enclosing 832directory. (Ooops.)</p> 833 834<a name="19-07-2015" /><a href="#19-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 19, 2015</b></h2></a> 835<blockquote><p> 836The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic 837component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar 838hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it 839around in." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy </p></blockquote> 840 841<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.0</a> 842(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.0>git commit</a>) 843is out. (Yes, git. See the <a href=#05-04-2015>previous news entry</a>.)</p> 844 845<p>Sorry for the unusually long gap between releases. Since last release Ye 846Olde Project Maintainer traveled to japan twice and had two more "once 847a century" floods at home. (Probably a coincidence.) Still catching up.</p> 848 849<h3><b>CELF/ELC talk and Wikipedia[citation needed] article</b></h3> 850 851<p>I gave another State Of The Toybox talk 852(<a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04XwAbtPmAg>video</a> 853<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2015.txt>outline</a>), in which I 854repeat my <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#07-11-2013>perennial</a> 855<a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/557309224535851009>complaint</a> 856that Wikipedia[citation needed] 857<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox>still</a> 858<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#Controversy_over_Toybox>says</a> 859toybox was relicensed before its hiatus, when relicensing was why 860the hiatus ended.</p> 861 862<p>Since Wikipedia[citation needed] seems unable to do the 863<a href=#15-11-2011>most</a> 864<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/log/tip/LICENSE>basic</a> 865<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011>research</a> on 866this point, and has stuck to an incorrect sequence of events for years, 867I've been gradually escalating my attempts to correct them. Toybox 868came out of mothballs in November 2011 <b>because</b> it could be 869relicensed. That's what opened up a new niche busybox wasn't already 870filling with a 10 year headstart.</p> 871 872<a name="asterisk_back" /> 873<p>The article has plenty of smaller issues<a href=#asterisk>*</a>, but 874given that I gave an entire talk at Ohio LinuxFest in 2013 875(<a href=http://landley.net/talks/ohio-2013.txt>outline</a>, 876<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 877my projects, that one bugs me.</p> 878 879<h3><b>New stuff this release</b></h3> 880 881<p>There's a new android menu in menuconfig, and rather a lot of Linux 882Security Module support (Smack for Tizen from Xavier Roche and José Bollo, 883and SELinux for Android from Elliott Hughes; see 884the Security Blanket menu under global settings in menuconfig) has 885trickled in, although there's still more to come.</p> 886 887<p><b>New commands:</b> Added reset, nproc, ionice, and iorenice. 888Elliott Hughes contributed xxd, runcon, 889restorecon, load_policy, getenforce, setenforce, getprop, and setprop. 890Promoted shred, nsenter, and hwclock.</p> 891 892<p>You can once again build catv now the flag infrastructure's been updated to 893let it coexist with cat -v. 894And on a long plane flight I wrote 895hexedit, an interactive hex editor that implements the start of 896cursor control infrastructure (for eventual use by less and vi and shell 897command history and so on).</p> 898 899<p><b>New options:</b> Added sed -E as a BSD-compatible synonym for -r. 900Upgraded oneit with -r (restart), -3 (send exiting PID values to child), 901and signal handling. Added -v option to timeout, -m to mknod, -u to shred, 902-t to dmesg, and -123 to head and tail. Added implicit "." to grep -r without 903any files to work on. Hyejin Kim requested prefix support for truncate -s. 904Greg Hackman added -inum to find. 905Jan Cybulski added the smack side of ls -Z support. Various patches also 906added -Z to mkdir, mknod, and mkfifo. 907Basic cp --preserve support went in, but not yet the xattr/LSM parts.</p> 908 909<p>The toybox command now has a --version option, 910which uses "git describe" if available.</p> 911 912<p><b>Build infrastructure:</b> 913The "make change" target now saves the output of each failed standalone 914command build in a .bad file, and "make defconfig" is quieter now.</p> 915 916<p>Paul Barker submitted a large patch changing command install paths so 917"toybox can be installed alongside busybox without confusing 918update-alternatives". (There's some argument over 919what the right paths should be, and I'm waiting for 920people to tell me what else needs fixing because I have no idea. I've 921been symlinking /bin to /usr/bin since 2002 922<a href=http://landley.net/writing/hackermonthly-issue022-pg33.pdf>for 923historical reasons</a>.)</p> 924 925<p><b>Docs:</b> The repository link now goes to github, with another link 926to the commit rss feed.</p> 927 928<p>Elliott Hughes updated the Android section of the roadmap 929(and he would know). Redid bits of scripts/mkstatus.py to make updating 930status.html easier, and the README is larger.</p> 931 932<p>More description of option parsing in code.html, which now describes the 933FLAG_x macros, switching flag macro sets with FOR_newcommand, how 934configuration zeroes flag macros and using FORCE_FLAGS to suppress the 935zeroing of options shared between commands. Also added description of ";" 936to make --longopts take an optional =value part, and more about TOYBOX_DEBUG 937to check NEWTOY() option strings (otherwise a bad option string makes 938lib/args.c obviously segfault, but doesn't explain why).</p> 939 940<p>Added a "Why 0BSD?" section to license.html when submitting zero clause bsd 941to SPDX (according to the pending license spreadsheet, it's been approved for 942SPDX 2.2).</p> 943 944<p>The old list of commands needing cleanup but not in pending was 945removed from toys/pending/README and instead the issues were added 946as TODO comments in the individual commands.</p> 947 948<p><b>Bugfixes:</b> 949Fixed mount -a segfaulting without -O (reported by Janus Troelsen), 950and made it try a "become rw" ioctl() on the block device before falling 951back to mounting read only (because Android expects that). 952Fixed printf -- and printf ---. Lots of tweaks to ls -l spacing with 953different options. Make touch -d and -t actually set time when you don't 954specify nanoseconds. 955Fixed a subtle bug where recursive calls (toybox commands that run other 956toybox commands) weren't resetting all their state. (This manifested as 957a "no }" error from "find | xargs sed", but could cause other problems.) 958And David Halls reported another sed bug trying to compile libiconv (which 959left extra \ at the start of lines in a generated shell script, breaking 960the build). Output an error message for "cat /mnt".</p> 961 962<p>Kylie McClain reported that mktemp broke when $TMPDIR was set to an empty 963string (which is not the same as unset), that install/find didn't support 964numeric uid/gids, and that sort -z affects both input and output. 965Isabella Parakiss fixed a printf.c bug. 966David Halls fixed bugs in install -D and find -exec. Samuel Holland 967fixed unshare -r. Hyejin Kim fixed makedevs with a count of 1, fold -w 968range checking, an error path in scripts/mkflags.c, added -i to dhcpd, 969and stopped su from prompting the root user for the new user's password. 970Jan Cybulski spotted wrong indentation when combining ls -s and -i with -C and 971-x. José Bollo fixed stat %G. Sameer Pradhan fixed a bug in mkfifo -Z.</p> 972 973<p>Elliott Hughes asked for a default SIGPIPE handler to disable 974the signal handler bionic's dynamic loader installs (yes really). Still not 975100% sure what the correct behavior is there. (Posix is 976(<a href=http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.standards.posix.austin.general/10915>actively unhelpful</a>, but at least they're taking 977<a href=http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=789#c1976>years to 978make up their mind</a>. Elliott also sent patches to fix a typo in 979useradd.test, add missing arguments to error_exit() calls and clean up 980printf() format strings, fix an off by one error in human_readable(), 981fix dmesg -c error reporting, fix a segfault in comma_scan where the option 982was the last item in optlist (triggered by mount -o ro,remount), fix 983hwclock -w, made ifconfig print lowercase MAC addresses (it was bothering 984him), and make terminal_size() read the right environment variable 985(LINES, not ROWS). And he suggested the test suite notice high command exit 986values (corresponding to segfault or other signals).</p> 987 988<p>People are apparently using toys/pending commands, despite the police tape 989and flashing lights, so added louder warnings to toys/pending/README. 990Elliott Hughes fixed various problems with tar, dd, more, and top. 991Hyejin Kim cleaned up syslogd and dumpleases. Isaac Dunham added hotplug 992support to mdev. Yeongdeok Suh added RFC-3315 ipv6 support to dhcpd.</p> 993 994<p>I rewrote ps.c from scratch (in pending), but it's not ready for real use 995yet.</p> 996 997<p><b>Portability:</b> 998On the portability front Bernhard Rosenkranzer fixed a problem where the 999menuconfig code wouldn't compile in C99 mode. (This led to me documenting 1000the craptacular nature of kconfig in a README, and the plan to replace it 1001sometime before 1.0.) Some extra flags to shut up overzealous llvm warnings 1002were added (and have to be probed for because gcc complains about 1003arguments it doesn't recognize even when they switch stuff _off_ using 1004a standard syntax). Don't depend on malloc(0) to return non-null in ls. 1005David Halls fixed some mac/ios portability issues, 1006implying somebody's built at least part of toybox on a mac.</p> 1007 1008<p>Added basename_r() to lib/lib.c because the posix semantics for basename() 1009are stupid but what the gnu guys did to it was appalling. 1010Turns out bionic already had a basename_r(), but posix still doesn't. 1011Fixed it up in portability.h, but this 1012could break more stuff in future. (Correct fix is to lobby posix to add it, 1013which would probably take about 15 years...)</p> 1014 1015<p><b>Infrastructure:</b> 1016The build now checks $LDFLAGS for linker-only flags, and allows the strip 1017command to fail (binflt toolchains provide a strip that doesn't work). 1018Since time.c uses floating point, added TOYBOX_FLOAT dependency in config.</p> 1019 1020<p>There's a lib/lsm.h defining varous inline functions for linux 1021security modules stuff, if (lsm_enabled()) should turn into a compile-time 1022constant 0 and let code drop out when TOYBOX_LSM_NONE selected, but 1023testing against CFG_TOYBOX_LSM_NONE or derived symbols is still useful 1024becuase when it _is_ enabled the probe turns into a system call you 1025don't want to repeat too much.</p> 1026 1027<p>Switched a bunch of commands from signal() to xsignal(). Factored out 1028xgetgrnamid() and xgetpwnamid() into xwrap.c. Make time.c depend on 1029TOYBOX_FLOAT (since it always uses float so shouldn't be available on 1030build targets without even software float). Added readfileat() to lib/lib.c.</p> 1031 1032<p>The dirtree infrastructure now passes in full flags for the old symlink 1033field, and the new DIRTREE_SHUTUP flag disables warnings if a file vanishes 1034out from under you during traverse. New dirtree_start() wrapper to 1035create dirtree root with only two arguments.</p> 1036 1037<p>The not-curses infrastructure introduced by hexedit mostly moved to 1038lib/interestingtimes.c.</p> 1039 1040<a name="asterisk" /> 1041<a href="#asterisk_back" />Asterisk:</a> such when 1042Tim contacted me (my blog says a couple days before nov 13, 2011, I.E. 104311/11/11 not some specific day 2 months later) to ask if I wanted to work 1044on a new project he was proposing called 1045<a href=http://www.elinux.org/Busybox_replacement_project>BentoBox</a> 1046(because I used to do busybox, he'd forgotten toybox existed 1047until I brought it up). And don't ask me what "focuses not on compatibility 1048with its GNU counterparts" means when CP_MORE adds 7 non-posix options 1049and toys/other has 84 commands in neither posix nor LSB. I think they're 1050struggling to explain the difference having dismissed "licensing" as being 1051the reason it started up again after a long hiatus? The reason I don't think 1052GNU is special is there are a half-dozen other independent 1053implementations of the same unix command tools out there (AT&T, 1054BSD, Coherent, Minix, plan 9, busybox, toybox, and several more analyzed in 1055the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a>, and that's ignoring the implementations 1056written for DOS or in assembly over the years). But I do care what 1057Linux From Scratch expects, and if it's 1058<a href=http://archive.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-museum/7.6/LFS-BOOK-7.6-NOCHUNKS.html#ch-tools-gcc-pass1>calling mv -v</a> 1059then I impelement mv -v 1060even if <a href=http://landley.net/toybox/roadmap.html>posix hasn't got 1061it</a>. And I don't know why "gnu counterparts" would describe this when 1062util-linux isn't a gnu package, nor are info-zip, e2fsprogs, kmod, less, 1063procps, shadow, sysklogd, vim, zlib, sudo, dhcpcd...</p> 1064 1065<a name="05-04-2015" /><a href="#05-04-2015"><hr><h2><b>April 5, 2015</b></h2></a> 1066<p>Since <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox/>android</a> and 1067<a href=https://git.tizen.org/cgit/platform/upstream/toybox.git>tizen</a> 1068and <a href=https://github.com/kraj/meta-musl/tree/master/recipes-core/toybox>openembedded</a> 1069and <a href=https://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/toybox>gentoo</a> 1070and so on have all been using Georgi Chorbadzhiyski's git mirror rather 1071than the mercurial repository, I bit the bullet and switched the project's repo 1072<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox>to git</a>. Georgi's 1073<a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>mirror</a> is now pulling from that.</p> 1074 1075<a name="25-02-2015" /><a href="#25-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 25, 2015</b></h2></a> 1076<blockquote><p>"A common mistake that people make when trying to design 1077something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of 1078complete fools."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1079 1080<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.5.2</a> 1081(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1702>commit 1702</a>) is out.</p> 1082 1083<p>New promoted commands: sed (finally fixed enough it builds Linux From 1084Scratch), printf (cleaned up and promoted), shred and 1085base64 (the Tizen guys wanted them), getenforce, setenforce, and chcon (android), 1086mix (promoted with fixes from Isaac Dunham), nsenter (from 1087Andy Lutomirski, merged into unshare).</p> 1088 1089<p>Elliott Hughes submited a bunch of patches to support Android (to 1090both toybox and Bionic libc, which he maintains). On toybox's end this 1091involved a lot of fixups to portability.[ch] and fixes to over a dozen 1092commands, plus several new ones. Other portability fixes included working 1093with buildroot's uclibc fork and building for nommu targets.</p> 1094 1095<p>The new "make change" target builds each toybox command as a standalone 1096binary. Rather a lot of commands that didn't build by themselves (mv depending 1097on cp and so on) were hit with a large rock until they built standalone. 1098This involved rewriting bits of option parsing, more elaborate dependency 1099generation, making each command have its own config 1100symbol and main() function (even when it's just a wrapper calling another 1101command's main()), and so on. Also, some commands can't be built standalone 1102at a conceptual level: "help" describes other enabled commands and "sh" 1103has a number of bulitin commands (cd, exit, set) that require the 1104multiplexer infrastructure, so "make change" filters them out.</p> 1105 1106<p>The mailing list's web archive is still screwed up. Dreamhost has 1107been trying to fix it since approximately September. There are 1108<a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>two</a> 1109<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>other</a> less broken 1110archives, but neither has quite the same UI as mailman.</p> 1111 1112<h3>Bugfixes and tweaks</h3> 1113 1114<p>Cynt Rynt sent in tests for ifconfig, 1115Robert Thompson taught factor to accept whitespace separated arguments, 1116Hyejin Kim pointed out that some of mktemp's longopts were attached to 1117the wrong short options, 1118Luis Felipe Strano Moraes fixed a wrong free() call in bootchartd in pending. 1119Patches from Ashwini Sharma to make "df /dev/node" work, prevent du from 1120looping endlessly following symlinks, and to make expr.c 1121(in pending) understand == and regex matches. (Speaking of expr, it gets 1122priority groupings wrong but the bug was actually in the posix spec's 1123HTML conversion. They fixed the posix spec upstream for us. Still need 1124to fix the expr code, but it's in pending for a reason...)</p> 1125 1126<p>Some commands grew new option flags, such as cp --remove-destination 1127and touch -h.</p> 1128 1129<p>The parallel build has better error reporting now. When toybox needs to 1130re-exec itself to regain suid root permissions and hasn't got the suid bit, 1131it now gives the right error message ("not root" instead of "no such command"). 1132 1133<p>Added a test to "mount" to not mount the same device/directory combination 1134over itself (the OS catches this for block devices, but not for tmpfs). 1135Make blkid distinguish ext3 from ext4. Added catv back into cat (because 1136the Android guys wanted it, and they have historical usage on their side, 1137so...). Handle nanoseconds in touch.</p> 1138 1139<p>Fixed a segfault when CP_MORE was disabled (the resulting option flag list 1140no longer defined -d but still had it in option groups at the end). 1141Workaround for glibc redefining dirname() and basename() to random non-posix 1142semantics because gnu. (They could have created dirname_r() but didn't want 1143to.)</p> 1144 1145<p>Fix an ifconfig test that was preventing assigning an ipv4 address to 1146interface aliases. Several cleanup passes on hwclock but not quite 1147promoted out of pending yet.<p> 1148 1149<p>Fixed a wrong error message in rm (if you had a chmod 000 directory and 1150did rm -r on it without -f, after the prompt it would complain it was a 1151directory, which was not the problem).</p> 1152 1153<p>The gzip compression code now does "store only" output to stdout, for 1154what that's worth.</p> 1155 1156<p>Cleanup mountpoint and expand, and remove them from toys/pending/README 1157(a list of commands that predate the toys/pending directory but needed 1158another pass).</p> 1159 1160<h3>Library and infrastructure:</h3> 1161 1162<p>Reworked the option parsing infrastructure so more commands build 1163standalone (via scripts/single.sh or "make change"). The option flag bit 1164values are no longer packed, it leaves spaces where currently disabled 1165flags go, and you can #define FORCE_FLAGS so disabled flags aren't zeroed. 1166This allows multiple commands to more easily share infrastructure, even if 1167your current flag context is for a disabled command (switched off in config), 1168you can force them to stay on and as long as the flags read the same right 1169to left they'll have the same values.</p> 1170 1171<p>We've started removing use of strncpy() because it's a hugely broken 1172standard C function: the length is the maximum length to _append_, not 1173the size of the destination buffer. It memsets the remaining space it didn't 1174copy ala "memset(dest+strlen(dest), 0, len);" so 1175if you think len is the size of dest you're guaranteed to stomp memory off the 1176end). And if it runs out of space it won't null terminate because reasons. 1177(Meanwhile sprintf("%*s", len, str) is counting wide characters in your current 1178locale, so if you set a locale other than "C" it will also go past your 1179allocated buffer size. Whoever is maintining the C library standards is really 1180bad at strings.) 1181Instead we have xstrncat() which will error_exit() if src+dest+1 doesn't 1182fit in the buffer. (Because randomly truncating input data isn't necessarily 1183an improvement.) And there's always xmprintf().</p> 1184 1185<p>Similarly, strtol() doesn't return an error indicator on overflow, 1186you have to clear and then check errno. So new xstrtol() that cares 1187about overflow.</p> 1188 1189<p>The bionic and musl guys agree faccessat(AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) is not 1190supported, so stop using it.</p> 1191 1192<p>Fixed toy_exec() to detect when argc is in optargs, so we don't 1193need a separate xexec_optargs().</p> 1194 1195<a name="18-02-2015" /><a href="#18-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 18, 2015</b></h2></a> 1196<p>Dreamhost continues to be unable to make mailing list archives work, so 1197here's <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>another 1198list archive</a> with a less awkward interface than gmane.</p> 1199 1200<p>(Neither gives you the convenient historical monthly views of mailman, 1201but I still have hopes dreamhost will someday figure out what they're doing 1202wrong. They've only been trying since October. Last month they did a 1203<a href=http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2015/01/14/discussion-list-hardware-maintenance/>hardware upgrade to fix a software problem</a>, and the stale 1204data loads much faster now, so that's something.)</p> 1205 1206<p>Update (Feb 19): the archive started updating again, by discarding 1207all the pending data. So there are now _two_ giant holes in Dreamhost's 1208web archive, from Dec 15-Jan 3, and then another hole from Jan 16-Feb 18. 1209The relevant messages are in both of the other archives. Here's hoping 1210the chronic archive constipation problem won't happen a sixth time.</p> 1211 1212<a name="30-12-2014" /><a href="#30-12-2014"><hr><h2><b>December 30, 2014</b></h2></a> 1213<p>Due to Dreamhost's <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>ongoing</a> 1214<a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>inability</a> to make mailman 1215work reliably, I've added a link to a backup web archive at 1216<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>gmane</a> to the nav bar 1217on the left.</p> 1218 1219<p>You still subscribe to the list through 1220<a href=http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net>the first link</a>.</p> 1221 1222<p>Update (January 27, 2015): they're <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/558428839462703104>still working on it</a>.</p> 1223 1224<a name="19-11-2014" /><a href="#19-11-2014"><hr><h2><b>November 19, 2014</b></h2></a> 1225 1226<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> 1227 1228<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.1</a> 1229(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1566>commit 1566</a>) is out.</p> 1230 1231<p>It's an interim release, mostly bugfixes. There are several new commands, 1232but they're all in pending.</p> 1233 1234<h3>Development</h3> 1235 1236<p>Finally implemented sed, which is still in pending because although 1237it's feature complete according to posix, and even passes the parts of 1238Busybox's sed test suite that aren't explicitly testing for gnu bugs we 1239don't want to copy, it's not yet good enough to build Linux From Scratch. 1240(The ./configure stages use very long sed scripts. 20 commits worth of 1241implementation and debugging, just under 1000 lines of code, and there's 1242still more to do. We're definitely up to some of the "fiddly" commands now. 1243Did you know "echo hello | sed p - -" segfaults gnu sed in Ubuntu 12.04? 1244Yeah...)</p> 1245 1246<p>Talked with the Tizen developers to follow up on their desire to 1247make toybox a part of the base Tizen system, and got a list of commands 1248to add to the roadmap. The tizen todo list is:</p> 1249 1250<blockquote><p> 1251wget, sha256*, gzip, gunzip, bunzip2, rsync, zdiff*, 1252less, ar, arch, base64, csplit, dir, fmt, join, 1253nproc, shred, shuf, stdbuf, stty, test, tr, unexpand, 1254users, vdir, diff3, sdiff, dosfsck (fsck.vfat), awk, fdisk 1255</p></blockquote> 1256 1257<p>(Most of which was already on the todo list, but it helps prioritize.)</p> 1258 1259<p>Fixed md5sum and sha1sum on big endian systems (reported by James McMechan). 1260Andy Lutomirski fixed unshare's help text and option parsing, 1261and submitted nsenter (a tool to use setns(2)) to pending. 1262Isaac Dunham implemented acpi -ctV options, and spotted the bug that ls -d 1263was inappropraitely following command line symlinks without -H or -L (it 1264should act like ls -l does), and ls -F handles symlinks wrong too. 1265Lukasz Szpakowski sent in two bugfixes to tail.c. Cynt Rynt spotted an 1266unnecessary assignment in lib/password.c.</p> 1267 1268<p>Ashwini Sharma's team was as busy as usual, submitting tr, crontab, and 1269ipcrm, and hwclock to pending, more features to the pending ip.c, and a 1270pile of bugfixes (to chgrp, killall, ifconfig, insmod, 1271losetup, comm, cp, id, xwrap, netcat, modprobe, nohup...) mostly found by 1272static analysis. (These fixes are mostly to seldom-used codepaths like the 1273TOYBOX_FREE config option, but test coverage is always appreciated.) Ashwini 1274also suggested upgrading ln -f to leave the original target alone if link 1275creation fails, and reported that mv -f and -i weren't implemented (now fixed).</p> 1276 1277<p>New config option: TOYBOX_NORECURSE prevents xexec() from making internal 1278function calls (for nommu systems with a finite stack).</p> 1279 1280<p>The "toybox" multiplexer command no longer adds a trailing space to each 1281line of command names, so things like "./toybox | tr ' \n' '|'" to create 1282a grep pattern snippet are easier to do. (Why you'd want to is your business, 1283but the output is tidier now.)</p> 1284 1285<h3>Infrastructure</h3> 1286 1287<p>Isaac Dunham added Android support to portability.h, including compile 1288probes for functions missing from bionic-libc, and annotated the commands that 1289use those functions. We haven't really tested building against bionic, 1290but in theory it's possible now.</p> 1291 1292<p>Running the test suite now color codes the PASS/SKIP/FAIL notifications 1293if output is to a tty. (And in case you missed it last time, VERBOSE=fail 1294to stop at the first failure is really useful.)</p> 1295 1296<p>In loopfiles_rw() use O_CLOEXEC instead of O_RDONLY to request the loop 1297function close filehandles for us. (Otherwise the callback function must 1298close each supplied filehandle itself.)</p> 1299 1300<p>The printf-style escape parsing ("\n" and friends) got factored out into 1301a new unescape() function.</p> 1302 1303<a name="02-10-2014" /><a href="#02-10-2014"><hr><h2><b>October 2, 2014</b></h2></a> 1304<blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. 1305The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss... 1306Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the 1307difficulties." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.<p></blockquote> 1308 1309<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a> 1310(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p> 1311 1312<h3>New commands</h3> 1313 1314<p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands 1315(cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p> 1316 1317<p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now 1318ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth 1319instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving 1320looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to 1321cut, touch, free, and id.</p> 1322 1323<p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini 1324Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded 1325fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code. 1326Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p> 1327 1328<h3>Build infrastructure</h3> 1329 1330<p><b>Parallel builds</b></p> 1331 1332<p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of 1333processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.) 1334Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain 1335about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now 1336gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p> 1337 1338<p><b>Standalone builds</b></p> 1339 1340<p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to 1341build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file 1342selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro 1343for the command. It enables each command's 1344sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build 1345full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when 1346the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro 1347now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY 1348without the NEWTOY</p> 1349 1350<p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that 1351aren't building standalone yet are:</p> 1352 1353<blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos, 1354whoami</p></blockquote> 1355 1356<p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY() 1357entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries 1358that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure 1359is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command 1360is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the 1361code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible 1362to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting 1363design goals in the two contexts.)</p> 1364 1365<p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual 1366commands. 1367 1368<p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p> 1369 1370<p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh 1371containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current 1372configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an 1373exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite 1374got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p> 1375 1376<h3>Internals</h3> 1377 1378<p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking 1379filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now 1380done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added 1381to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now 1382requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false). 1383Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various 1384pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can 1385use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode. 1386Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether 1387we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p> 1388 1389<p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges 1390(which happens when you suid something _other_ than root). 1391The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the 1392command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled), 1393toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse 1394internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth), 1395always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when 1396we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes, 1397dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in 1398error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an 1399option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments 1400saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched 1401off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio. 1402Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall 1403with no arguments (segfaulted).</p> 1404 1405<p><b>Portability</b></p> 1406 1407<p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx 1408to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl 1409maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed 1410instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section 1411to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your 1412build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do 1413a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make 1414it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns 1415requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch 1416to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current 1417musl source control.)</p> 1418 1419<p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have 1420another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p> 1421 1422<p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p> 1423 1424<p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small 1425allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing 1426"$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic 1427is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux 1428filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters 1429we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd), 1430newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in 1431filesystem).</p> 1432 1433<h3>Documentation</h3> 1434 1435<p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html 1436documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently 1437(it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p> 1438 1439<p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup 1440before the pending directory was added.</p> 1441 1442<h3>Test Suite</h3> 1443 1444<p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the 1445testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p> 1446 1447<p>Johan Bergström requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to 1448stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu 1449sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p> 1450 1451<p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat, 1452and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p> 1453 1454<a name="07-07-2014" /><a href="#07-07-2014"><hr><h2><b>July 7, 2014</b></h2></a> 1455<blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: 1456most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many 1457solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely 1458concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd 1459because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were 1460unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1461 1462<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> 1463 1464<p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include: 1465lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs, 1466killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han, 1467sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh, 1468host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p> 1469 1470<p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending): 1471sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5, 1472fallocate, and nbd-client.</p> 1473 1474<p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps, 1475bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd, 1476login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's 1477still more to do on all of those.)</p> 1478 1479<p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against 1480musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't 1481support that target yet.)</p> 1482 1483<p><b>Documentation:</b></p> 1484 1485<p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with 1486a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the 1487"coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show 1488stopper for incoming 1489contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them 1490during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes 1491the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p> 1492 1493<p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the 1494full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p> 1495 1496<p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is 1497a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more 1498elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option 1499parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p> 1500 1501<p><b>Fixes</b>:</p> 1502 1503<p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default 1504output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported 1505bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init() 1506was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound) 1507had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be 1508there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at 1509the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test 1510in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return 1511success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and 1512ferror() from xprintf().</p> 1513 1514<p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff 1515implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some 1516diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from 1517a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops 1518at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set, 1519which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of 1520chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p> 1521 1522<p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final 1523build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of 1524libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p> 1525 1526<p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes, 1527so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities. 1528So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the 1529setup code to setlocale().</p> 1530 1531<p><b>Upgrades:</b></p> 1532 1533<p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it 1534to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also 1535added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database 1536parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p> 1537 1538<p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making 1539it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum 1540for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other 1541implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p> 1542 1543<p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname), 1544the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get 1545a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p> 1546 1547<p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP 1548command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p> 1549 1550<p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always 1551build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p> 1552 1553<p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so 1554we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0 1555filename" actually works again.</p> 1556 1557<p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd, 1558and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill, 1559groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still 1560working to fix them.</p> 1561 1562<p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a 1563dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new 1564generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte 1565to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's 1566initialized to in toy_init).</p> 1567 1568<p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and 1569use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro 1570contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs 1571decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion 1572bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you 1573cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the 1574first one, the build break is now more informative).</p> 1575 1576<a name="20-04-2014" /><a href="#20-04-2014"><hr><h2><b>April 20, 2014</b></h2></a> 1577<blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer 1578which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks 1579had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as 1580far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to 1581turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1582 1583<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on 1584<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And 1585about time too.</p> 1586 1587<p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h, 1588that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text 1589from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines. 1590There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p> 1591 1592<p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the 1593way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the 1594<a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk, 1595Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p> 1596 1597<p><b>In pending:</b> 1598Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more, 1599groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added 1600ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty. 1601Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold. 1602I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in 1603compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side) 1604and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p> 1605 1606<p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot, 1607cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus 1608in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some 1609work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations 1610documented what their output actually meant).</p> 1611 1612<p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to 1613handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the 1614fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h 1615options (all commands, html output). 1616Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually 1617set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross 1618compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween 1619sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code. 1620Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options 1621to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and 1622allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded 1623tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after 1624that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting. 1625Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of 1626pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified 1627find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on 1628the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions 1629now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with 1630aliasing.</p> 1631 1632<p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you 1633can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same 1634.c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the 1635bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example. 1636i 1637<p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers 1638not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h 1639was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc 1640configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p> 1641 1642<p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig 1643build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily 1644the absolute latest build environment.)</p> 1645 1646<p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid(). 1647xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd 1648and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command, 1649get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and 1650xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into 1651bzcat.c.</p> 1652 1653<p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the 1654help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output. 1655The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about 1656#including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The 1657<a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading 1658of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for 1659good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion 1660at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p> 1661 1662<a name="18-11-2013" /><a href="#18-11-2013"><hr><h2><b>November 18, 2013</b></h2></a> 1663<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." - 1664The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1665 1666<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.7.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.7</a> is based on 1667<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p> 1668 1669<p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted 1670reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from 1671pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some 1672cleanup.</p> 1673 1674<p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going 1675into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted 1676dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and 1677an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p> 1678 1679<p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer 1680added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem. 1681William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input 1682(the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug 1683where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault). 1684I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using 1685the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a 1686synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with 1687$CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted 1688a typo in the web page.</p> 1689 1690<p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from 1691bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by 1692--longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal 1693querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a 1694debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply). 1695The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and 1696micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite 1697now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p> 1698 1699<a name="17-09-2013" /><a href="#17-09-2013"><hr><h2><b>September 17, 2013</b></h2></a> 1700<blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number." 1701Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway 1702station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function, 1703and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 1704</blockquote> 1705 1706<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on 1707<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p> 1708 1709<p>This release adds 1710several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han 1711submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and 1712a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted 1713acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p> 1714 1715<p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker). 1716The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah" 1717instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in. 1718Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain 1719other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who 1720heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID 1721namespace support.</p> 1722 1723<h3>Pending</h3> 1724 1725<p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should 1726probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd, 1727dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from 1728Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet), 1729syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar, 1730test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E. 1731M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p> 1732 1733<p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't 1734ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig 1735and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up 1736logger and syslogd...</p> 1737 1738<p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory, 1739but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du, 1740expand, and touch.</p> 1741 1742<h3>Infrastructure</h3> 1743 1744<p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the 1745multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes, 1746OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a 1747command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If 1748you're curious, you can do:</p> 1749 1750<blockquote><pre> 1751make defconfig 1752make 1753mkdir singles 1754for i in $(./toybox) 1755do 1756 echo $i 1757 PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break 1758done 1759</pre> 1760<p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p> 1761</blockquote> 1762 1763<p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this 1764time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p> 1765 1766<p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions 1767not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains 1768functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit). 1769This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p> 1770 1771<p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude 1772logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts 1773should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ; 1774option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E. 1775--color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p> 1776 1777<p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf 1778does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it 1779for us".</p> 1780 1781<p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid(). 1782It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite 1783so much anymore.</p> 1784 1785<p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly 1786linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are 1787using it now.</p> 1788 1789<p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag 1790(-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables) 1791that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept 1792into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler, 1793"-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p> 1794 1795<h3>Bugfixes</h3> 1796 1797<p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to 1798finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f 1799someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once). 1800Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p> 1801 1802<p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that 1803python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks 1804for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer 1805then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p> 1806 1807<p>Ashwini Sharma 1808pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some 1809configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p> 1810 1811<p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and 1812a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p> 1813 1814<p>The new function xexec_optargs() 1815replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs 1816during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p> 1817 1818<p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which 1819didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup 1820between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh 1821command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p> 1822 1823<p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't 1824delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm 1825should now be fixed.</p> 1826 1827<p> 1828<a name="26-07-2013" /><a href="#26-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 26, 2013</b></h2></a> 1829<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git 1830mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the 1831mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches 1832against it and post them to the list.</p> 1833 1834<a name="02-07-2013" /><a href="#02-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 2, 2013</b></h2></a> 1835<blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You 1836should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people 1837like you." - 1838The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1839 1840<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on 1841<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds 1842uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by 1843default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and 1844enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups". 1845Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv". 1846</p> 1847 1848<p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and 1849each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help" 1850and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p> 1851 1852<p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client, 1853logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup. 1854Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up. 1855(It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p> 1856 1857<p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach 1858more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The 1859<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis 1860of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p> 1861 1862<p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected, 1863condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught 1864-l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices. 1865Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking), 1866and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no 1867corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work). 1868Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham 1869fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output 1870field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means 1871to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda 1872moved file permission display code to lib so ls and 1873stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the 1874last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it 1875(ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user). 1876</p> 1877 1878<p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global 1879variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc 1880debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and 1881that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of 1882just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking 1883against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes 1884for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes 1885various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical 1886(breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names). 1887 1888<p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build 1889system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The 1890release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control. 1891Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p> 1892</p> 1893 1894<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 1895BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first 1896paragraph now says:</p> 1897 1898<blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this 1899software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote> 1900 1901<p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this 1902permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all 1903copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects 1904that 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 1905both 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 1906less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate 1907the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p> 1908 1909<p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more 1910or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it 1911BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p> 1912 1913<a name="21-03-2013" /><a href="#21-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 21, 2013</b></h2></a> 1914<p>Video of my ELC talk 1915"<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>" 1916is up on youtube. Related materials include the 1917<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an 1918<a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p> 1919 1920<p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about 1921the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p> 1922 1923<ul> 1924<li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li> 1925 <ul> 1926 <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li> 1927 <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li> 1928 </ul> 1929<li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li> 1930 <ul> 1931 <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li> 1932 </ul> 1933<li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li> 1934<li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li> 1935<li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li> 1936 <ul> 1937 <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li> 1938 <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li> 1939 <ul> 1940 <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li> 1941 <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li> 1942 </ul> 1943 </ul> 1944</ul> 1945</span> 1946 1947 1948<a name="14-03-2013" /><a href="#14-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 14, 2013</b></h2></a> 1949<blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." - 1950The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1951 1952<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on 1953<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding 1954the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p> 1955 1956<p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes 1957getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds. 1958"id -Gn root" should now print root's groups 1959instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under 1960Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you 1961can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p> 1962 1963<p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending". 1964Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig. 1965Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig 1966should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p> 1967 1968<p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries 1969(klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p> 1970 1971<a name="18-01-2013" /><a href="#18-01-2013"><hr><h2><b>January 18, 2013</b></h2></a> 1972<blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1973 1974<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on 1975<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There 1976are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the 1977<a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p> 1978 1979<p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s 1980and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to 1981kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite. 1982Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p> 1983 1984<p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and 1985readlink commands. The segfault in ls 1986happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the 1987default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an 1988extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing 1989a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath() 1990code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test 1991suite checks for it).</p> 1992 1993<p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the 1994error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's 1995still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error 1996bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That 1997means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right 1998error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.) 1999Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG 2000doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with 2001at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic 2002(and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma). 2003dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree 2004functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using 2005libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means 2006it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p> 2007 2008<p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that 2009disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back 2010to -Os by default now.</p> 2011 2012<a name="15-12-2012" /><a href="#15-12-2012"><hr><h2><b>December 15, 2012</b></h2></a> 2013<blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a 2014thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly 2015go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." 2016</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2017 2018<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on 2019<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is 2020just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal 2021Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's 2022a new stable version.</p> 2023 2024<p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch 2025(from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a 2026bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8 2027support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option. 2028Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof. 2029The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports 2030-fenq.</p> 2031 2032<p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library, 2033and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel 2034features we depend on start to drop out).</p> 2035 2036<p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per 2037level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more 2038than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out, 2039or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an 2040earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README, 2041the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory 2042(so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p> 2043 2044<p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist(). 2045Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with 2046full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to 2047stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing 2048it).</p> 2049 2050<p>The open group broke their website so the 2051<a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008 2052now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with 2053pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while 2054I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p> 2055 2056<p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant 2057because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current 2058implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option 2059to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks, 2060but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024 2061filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p> 2062 2063<a name="13-11-2012" /><a href="#13-11-2012"><hr><h2><b>November 13, 2012</b></h2></a> 2064<blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins." 2065- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2066 2067<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on 2068<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p> 2069 2070<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and 2071Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and 2072md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix, 2073unix2dos).</p> 2074 2075<p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by 2076default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name. 2077Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p> 2078 2079<p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into 2080"posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008, 2081the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig 2082and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on). 2083An android directory is planned (see the updated 2084<a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p> 2085 2086<p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's 2087global block are now automatically generated, commands should 2088#define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that 2089command.</p> 2090 2091<p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and - 2092in them, such as switch_root.</p> 2093 2094<p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of 2095uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers. 2096The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite 2097properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's 2098fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage 2099calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp 2100and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces 2101break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite 2102properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's 2103fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib 2104fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary 2105on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending 2106on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in 2107a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking 2108partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts: 2109this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it 2110wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite 2111some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to 2112successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc 2113versions was added to portability.h.</p> 2114 2115<p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a 2116rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All 2117the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards 2118document, where applicable.</p> 2119 2120<p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into 2121a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p> 2122 2123<p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're 2124back now.</p> 2125</span> 2126 2127<a name="23-07-2012" /><a href="#23-07-2012"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2012</b></h2></a> 2128<blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys 2129out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked 2130out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2131 2132<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on 2133<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p> 2134 2135<p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from 2136the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p> 2137 2138<p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed 2139taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han 2140contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a 2141case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p> 2142 2143<p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the 2144<a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and 2145<a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option 2146to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime), 2147fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the 2148corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding 2149glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing 2150pending output on exit.</p> 2151 2152<a name="25-06-2012" /><a href="#25-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 25, 2012</b></h2></a> 2153<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> 2154 2155<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit 2156<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's 2157mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than 2158x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which 2159now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test 2160suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the 2161musl libc.</p> 2162 2163<p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here 2164it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40 2165pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p> 2166</span> 2167 2168<a name="12-06-2012" /><a href="#12-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 12, 2012</b></h2></a> 2169<blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that 2170he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the 2171wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was 2172muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had 2173always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely 2174the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2175 2176<p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>, 2177so here it is, based 2178on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the 2179statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should 2180actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting 2181that).</p> 2182 2183<p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development 2184doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course. 2185The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which 2186threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit 2187more frequent from here on.</p> 2188 2189<p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory 2190tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that 2191which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p> 2192 2193<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown, 2194chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if 2195you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug 2196on slackware.</p> 2197 2198<p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and 2199mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint, 2200vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups. 2201Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p> 2202 2203<p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell 2204wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove 2205deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and 2206musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got 2207some cleanups and bugfixes.</p> 2208 2209<p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not 2210to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's 2211problematic).</p> 2212 2213<p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now, 2214yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the 2215SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox 2216multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer 2217segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full 2218posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next 2219release.)</p> 2220 2221<p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros 2222for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue 2223is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p> 2224 2225<p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built 2226Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that 2227'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing. 2228(The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted 2229yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before 22301.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p> 2231 2232 2233<a name="03-03-2012" /><a href="#03-03-2012"><hr><h2><b>March 3, 2012</b></h2></a> 2234 2235<blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral 2236without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them. 2237Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking 2238for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p> 2239</p></blockquote> 2240 2241<p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based 2242on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>. This 2243time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt 2244binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p> 2245 2246<p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I 2247have not quite been keeping up.)</p> 2248 2249<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod, 2250insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename. Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln, 2251realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall. Daniel 2252Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests 2253for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp. 2254Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed 2255cross compiling to work more reliably.</p> 2256 2257<p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's 2258code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new 2259code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python 2260bloat-o-meter.)</p> 2261 2262<p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from 2263Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott, 2264more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano 2265Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and 2266optimizations.</p> 2267 2268<p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link, 2269dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months 2270and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p> 2271 2272 2273<a name="12-02-2012" /><a href="#12-02-2012"><hr><h2><b>February 12, 2012</b></h2></a> 2274<blockquote><p> 2275"for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at 2276least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two 2277important respects..."</p> 2278<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 2279 2280<p>Here's the first BSD licensed release, 2281<a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization 2282point than anything particularly useful. 47 commands in a reasonably 2283ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially 2284finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several 2285patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p> 2286 2287<p>More to come...</p> 2288 2289<hr> 2290<a name="15-11-2011" /><a href="#15-11-2011"><hr><h2><b>November 15, 2011</b></h2></a> 2291- Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2 2292clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line 2293implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p> 2294 2295<p>More to come...</p> 2296 2297<hr> 2298 2299<p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p> 2300 2301<!--#include file="footer.html" --> 2302