1 <html><head><title>toybox news</title>
2 <!--#include file="header.html" -->
4 <p>Toybox combines common Linux command line utilities together
5 into a single BSD-licensed executable that's simple, small, fast,
6 reasonably standards-compliant, and powerful enough to turn Android into
7 a development environment. See the links on the left for details.</p>
11 <hr><b>April 5, 2015</b>
12 <p>Since <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox/>android</a> and
13 <a href=https://git.tizen.org/cgit/platform/upstream/toybox.git>tizen</a>
14 and <a href=https://github.com/kraj/meta-musl/tree/master/recipes-core/toybox>openembedded</a>
15 and <a href=https://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/toybox>gentoo</a>
16 and so on have all been using Georgi Chorbadzhiyski's git mirror rather
17 than the mercurial repository, I bit the bullet and switched the project's repo
18 <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox>to git</a>. Georgi's
19 <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>mirror</a> is now pulling from that.</p>
21 <hr><b>February 25, 2015</b>
22 <blockquote><p>"A common mistake that people make when trying to design
23 something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of
24 complete fools."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
26 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.5.2</a>
27 (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1702>commit 1702</a>) is out.</p>
29 <p>New promoted commands: sed (finally fixed enough it builds Linux From
30 Scratch), printf (cleaned up and promoted), shred and
31 base64 (the Tizen guys wanted them), getenforce, setenforce, and chcon (android),
32 mix (promoted with fixes from Isaac Dunham), nsenter (from
33 Andy Lutomirski, merged into unshare).</p>
35 <p>Elliott Hughes submited a bunch of patches to support Android (to
36 both toybox and Bionic libc, which he maintains). On toybox's end this
37 involved a lot of fixups to portability.[ch] and fixes to over a dozen
38 commands, plus several new ones. Other portability fixes included working
39 with buildroot's uclibc fork and building for nommu targets.</p>
41 <p>The new "make change" target builds each toybox command as a standalone
42 binary. Rather a lot of commands that didn't build by themselves (mv depending
43 on cp and so on) were hit with a large rock until they built standalone.
44 This involved rewriting bits of option parsing, more elaborate dependency
45 generation, making each command have its own config
46 symbol and main() function (even when it's just a wrapper calling another
47 command's main()), and so on. Also, some commands can't be built standalone
48 at a conceptual level: "help" describes other enabled commands and "sh"
49 has a number of bulitin commands (cd, exit, set) that require the
50 multiplexer infrastructure, so "make change" filters them out.</p>
52 <p>The mailing list's web archive is still screwed up. Dreamhost has
53 been trying to fix it since approximately September. There are
54 <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>two</a>
55 <a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>other</a> less broken
56 archives, but neither has quite the same UI as mailman.</p>
58 <h3>Bugfixes and tweaks</h3>
60 <p>Cynt Rynt sent in tests for ifconfig,
61 Robert Thompson taught factor to accept whitespace separated arguments,
62 Hyejin Kim pointed out that some of mktemp's longopts were attached to
63 the wrong short options,
64 Luis Felipe Strano Moraes fixed a wrong free() call in bootchartd in pending.
65 Patches from Ashwini Sharma to make "df /dev/node" work, prevent du from
66 looping endlessly following symlinks, and to make expr.c
67 (in pending) understand == and regex matches. (Speaking of expr, it gets
68 priority groupings wrong but the bug was actually in the posix spec's
69 HTML conversion. They fixed the posix spec upstream for us. Still need
70 to fix the expr code, but it's in pending for a reason...)</p>
72 <p>Some commands grew new option flags, such as cp --remove-destination
75 <p>The parallel build has better error reporting now. When toybox needs to
76 re-exec itself to regain suid root permissions and hasn't got the suid bit,
77 it now gives the right error message ("not root" instead of "no such command").
79 <p>Added a test to "mount" to not mount the same device/directory combination
80 over itself (the OS catches this for block devices, but not for tmpfs).
81 Make blkid distinguish ext3 from ext4. Added catv back into cat (because
82 the Android guys wanted it, and they have historical usage on their side,
83 so...). Handle nanoseconds in touch.</p>
85 <p>Fixed a segfault when CP_MORE was disabled (the resulting option flag list
86 no longer defined -d but still had it in option groups at the end).
87 Workaround for glibc redefining dirname() and basename() to random non-posix
88 semantics because gnu. (They could have created dirname_r() but didn't want
91 <p>Fix an ifconfig test that was preventing assigning an ipv4 address to
92 interface aliases. Several cleanup passes on hwclock but not quite
93 promoted out of pending yet.<p>
95 <p>Fixed a wrong error message in rm (if you had a chmod 000 directory and
96 did rm -r on it without -f, after the prompt it would complain it was a
97 directory, which was not the problem).</p>
99 <p>The gzip compression code now does "store only" output to stdout, for
100 what that's worth.</p>
102 <p>Cleanup mountpoint and expand, and remove them from toys/pending/README
103 (a list of commands that predate the toys/pending directory but needed
106 <h3>Library and infrastructure:</h3>
108 <p>Reworked the option parsing infrastructure so more commands build
109 standalone (via scripts/single.sh or "make change"). The option flag bit
110 values are no longer packed, it leaves spaces where currently disabled
111 flags go, and you can #define FORCE_FLAGS so disabled flags aren't zeroed.
112 This allows multiple commands to more easily share infrastructure, even if
113 your current flag context is for a disabled command (switched off in config),
114 you can force them to stay on and as long as the flags read the same right
115 to left they'll have the same values.</p>
117 <p>We've started removing use of strncpy() because it's a hugely broken
118 standard C function: the length is the maximum length to _append_, not
119 the size of the destination buffer. It memsets the remaining space it didn't
120 copy ala "memset(dest+strlen(dest), 0, len);" so
121 if you think len is the size of dest you're guaranteed to stomp memory off the
122 end). And if it runs out of space it won't null terminate because reasons.
123 (Meanwhile sprintf("%*s", len, str) is counting wide characters in your current
124 locale, so if you set a locale other than "C" it will also go past your
125 allocated buffer size. Whoever is maintining the C library standards is really
127 Instead we have xstrncat() which will error_exit() if src+dest+1 doesn't
128 fit in the buffer. (Because randomly truncating input data isn't necessarily
129 an improvement.) And there's always xmprintf().</p>
131 <p>Similarly, strtol() doesn't return an error indicator on overflow,
132 you have to clear and then check errno. So new xstrtol() that cares
135 <p>The bionic and musl guys agree faccessat(AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) is not
136 supported, so stop using it.</p>
138 <p>Fixed toy_exec() to detect when argc is in optargs, so we don't
139 need a separate xexec_optargs().</p>
141 <hr><b>February 18, 2015</b>
142 <p>Dreamhost continues to be unable to make mailing list archives work, so
143 here's <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>another
144 list archive</a> with a less awkward interface than gmane.</p>
146 <p>(Neither gives you the convenient historical monthly views of mailman,
147 but I still have hopes dreamhost will someday figure out what they're doing
148 wrong. They've only been trying since October. Last month they did a
149 <a href=http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2015/01/14/discussion-list-hardware-maintenance/>hardware upgrade to fix a software problem</a>, and the stale
150 data loads much faster now, so that's something.)</p>
152 <p>Update (Feb 19): the archive started updating again, by discarding
153 all the pending data. So there are now _two_ giant holes in Dreamhost's
154 web archive, from Dec 15-Jan 3, and then another hole from Jan 16-Feb 18.
155 The relevant messages are in both of the other archives. Here's hoping
156 the chronic archive constipation problem won't happen a sixth time.</p>
158 <hr><b>December 30, 2014</b>
159 <p>Due to Dreamhost's <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>ongoing</a>
160 <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>inability</a> to make mailman
161 work reliably, I've added a link to a backup web archive at
162 <a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>gmane</a> to the nav bar
165 <p>You still subscribe to the list through
166 <a href=http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net>the first link</a>.</p>
168 <p>Update (January 27, 2015): they're <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/558428839462703104>still working on it</a>.</p>
170 <hr><b>November 19, 2014</b>
172 <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>
174 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.1</a>
175 (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1566>commit 1566</a>) is out.</p>
177 <p>It's an interim release, mostly bugfixes. There are several new commands,
178 but they're all in pending.</p>
182 <p>Finally implemented sed, which is still in pending because although
183 it's feature complete according to posix, and even passes the parts of
184 Busybox's sed test suite that aren't explicitly testing for gnu bugs we
185 don't want to copy, it's not yet good enough to build Linux From Scratch.
186 (The ./configure stages use very long sed scripts. 20 commits worth of
187 implementation and debugging, just under 1000 lines of code, and there's
188 still more to do. We're definitely up to some of the "fiddly" commands now.
189 Did you know "echo hello | sed p - -" segfaults gnu sed in Ubuntu 12.04?
192 <p>Talked with the Tizen developers to follow up on their desire to
193 make toybox a part of the base Tizen system, and got a list of commands
194 to add to the roadmap. The tizen todo list is:</p>
197 wget, sha256*, gzip, gunzip, bunzip2, rsync, zdiff*,
198 less, ar, arch, base64, csplit, dir, fmt, join,
199 nproc, shred, shuf, stdbuf, stty, test, tr, unexpand,
200 users, vdir, diff3, sdiff, dosfsck (fsck.vfat), awk, fdisk
203 <p>(Most of which was already on the todo list, but it helps prioritize.)</p>
205 <p>Fixed md5sum and sha1sum on big endian systems (reported by James McMechan).
206 Andy Lutomirski fixed unshare's help text and option parsing,
207 and submitted nsenter (a tool to use setns(2)) to pending.
208 Isaac Dunham implemented acpi -ctV options, and spotted the bug that ls -d
209 was inappropraitely following command line symlinks without -H or -L (it
210 should act like ls -l does), and ls -F handles symlinks wrong too.
211 Lukasz Szpakowski sent in two bugfixes to tail.c. Cynt Rynt spotted an
212 unnecessary assignment in lib/password.c.</p>
214 <p>Ashwini Sharma's team was as busy as usual, submitting tr, crontab, and
215 ipcrm, and hwclock to pending, more features to the pending ip.c, and a
216 pile of bugfixes (to chgrp, killall, ifconfig, insmod,
217 losetup, comm, cp, id, xwrap, netcat, modprobe, nohup...) mostly found by
218 static analysis. (These fixes are mostly to seldom-used codepaths like the
219 TOYBOX_FREE config option, but test coverage is always appreciated.) Ashwini
220 also suggested upgrading ln -f to leave the original target alone if link
221 creation fails, and reported that mv -f and -i weren't implemented (now fixed).</p>
223 <p>New config option: TOYBOX_NORECURSE prevents xexec() from making internal
224 function calls (for nommu systems with a finite stack).</p>
226 <p>The "toybox" multiplexer command no longer adds a trailing space to each
227 line of command names, so things like "./toybox | tr ' \n' '|'" to create
228 a grep pattern snippet are easier to do. (Why you'd want to is your business,
229 but the output is tidier now.)</p>
231 <h3>Infrastructure</h3>
233 <p>Isaac Dunham added Android support to portability.h, including compile
234 probes for functions missing from bionic-libc, and annotated the commands that
235 use those functions. We haven't really tested building against bionic,
236 but in theory it's possible now.</p>
238 <p>Running the test suite now color codes the PASS/SKIP/FAIL notifications
239 if output is to a tty. (And in case you missed it last time, VERBOSE=fail
240 to stop at the first failure is really useful.)</p>
242 <p>In loopfiles_rw() use O_CLOEXEC instead of O_RDONLY to request the loop
243 function close filehandles for us. (Otherwise the callback function must
244 close each supplied filehandle itself.)</p>
246 <p>The printf-style escape parsing ("\n" and friends) got factored out into
247 a new unescape() function.</p>
249 <hr><b>October 2, 2014</b>
250 <blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
251 The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss...
252 Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the
253 difficulties." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.<p></blockquote>
255 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a>
256 (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p>
258 <h3>New commands</h3>
260 <p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands
261 (cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p>
263 <p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now
264 ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth
265 instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving
266 looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to
267 cut, touch, free, and id.</p>
269 <p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini
270 Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded
271 fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code.
272 Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p>
274 <h3>Build infrastructure</h3>
276 <p><b>Parallel builds</b></p>
278 <p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of
279 processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.)
280 Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain
281 about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now
282 gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p>
284 <p><b>Standalone builds</b></p>
286 <p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to
287 build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file
288 selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro
289 for the command. It enables each command's
290 sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build
291 full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when
292 the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro
293 now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY
294 without the NEWTOY</p>
296 <p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that
297 aren't building standalone yet are:</p>
299 <blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos,
300 whoami</p></blockquote>
302 <p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY()
303 entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries
304 that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure
305 is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command
306 is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the
307 code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible
308 to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting
309 design goals in the two contexts.)</p>
311 <p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual
314 <p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p>
316 <p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh
317 containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current
318 configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an
319 exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite
320 got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p>
324 <p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking
325 filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now
326 done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added
327 to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now
328 requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false).
329 Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various
330 pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can
331 use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode.
332 Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether
333 we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p>
335 <p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges
336 (which happens when you suid something _other_ than root).
337 The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the
338 command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled),
339 toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse
340 internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth),
341 always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when
342 we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes,
343 dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in
344 error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an
345 option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments
346 saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched
347 off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio.
348 Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall
349 with no arguments (segfaulted).</p>
351 <p><b>Portability</b></p>
353 <p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx
354 to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl
355 maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed
356 instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section
357 to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your
358 build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do
359 a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make
360 it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns
361 requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch
362 to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current
363 musl source control.)</p>
365 <p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have
366 another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p>
368 <p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p>
370 <p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small
371 allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing
372 "$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic
373 is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux
374 filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters
375 we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd),
376 newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in
379 <h3>Documentation</h3>
381 <p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html
382 documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently
383 (it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p>
385 <p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup
386 before the pending directory was added.</p>
390 <p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the
391 testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p>
393 <p>Johan Bergström requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to
394 stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu
395 sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p>
397 <p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat,
398 and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p>
400 <hr><b>July 7, 2014</b>
401 <blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this:
402 most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many
403 solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely
404 concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd
405 because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were
406 unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
408 <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>
410 <p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include:
411 lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs,
412 killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han,
413 sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh,
414 host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p>
416 <p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending):
417 sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5,
418 fallocate, and nbd-client.</p>
420 <p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps,
421 bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd,
422 login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's
423 still more to do on all of those.)</p>
425 <p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against
426 musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't
427 support that target yet.)</p>
429 <p><b>Documentation:</b></p>
431 <p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with
432 a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the
433 "coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show
435 contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them
436 during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes
437 the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p>
439 <p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the
440 full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p>
442 <p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is
443 a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more
444 elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option
445 parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p>
449 <p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default
450 output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported
451 bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init()
452 was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound)
453 had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be
454 there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at
455 the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test
456 in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return
457 success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and
458 ferror() from xprintf().</p>
460 <p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff
461 implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some
462 diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from
463 a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops
464 at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set,
465 which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of
466 chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p>
468 <p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final
469 build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of
470 libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p>
472 <p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes,
473 so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities.
474 So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the
475 setup code to setlocale().</p>
477 <p><b>Upgrades:</b></p>
479 <p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it
480 to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also
481 added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database
482 parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p>
484 <p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making
485 it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum
486 for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other
487 implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p>
489 <p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname),
490 the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get
491 a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p>
493 <p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP
494 command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p>
496 <p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always
497 build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p>
499 <p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so
500 we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0
501 filename" actually works again.</p>
503 <p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd,
504 and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill,
505 groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still
506 working to fix them.</p>
508 <p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a
509 dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new
510 generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte
511 to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's
512 initialized to in toy_init).</p>
514 <p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and
515 use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro
516 contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs
517 decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion
518 bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you
519 cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the
520 first one, the build break is now more informative).</p>
522 <hr><b>April 20, 2014</b>
523 <blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer
524 which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks
525 had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as
526 far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to
527 turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
529 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on
530 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And
533 <p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h,
534 that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text
535 from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines.
536 There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p>
538 <p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the
539 way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the
540 <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk,
541 Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p>
543 <p><b>In pending:</b>
544 Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more,
545 groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added
546 ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty.
547 Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold.
548 I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in
549 compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side)
550 and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p>
552 <p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot,
553 cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus
554 in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some
555 work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations
556 documented what their output actually meant).</p>
558 <p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to
559 handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the
560 fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h
561 options (all commands, html output).
562 Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually
563 set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross
564 compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween
565 sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code.
566 Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options
567 to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and
568 allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded
569 tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after
570 that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting.
571 Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of
572 pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified
573 find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on
574 the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions
575 now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with
578 <p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you
579 can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same
580 .c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the
581 bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example.
583 <p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers
584 not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h
585 was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc
586 configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p>
588 <p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig
589 build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily
590 the absolute latest build environment.)</p>
592 <p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid().
593 xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd
594 and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command,
595 get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and
596 xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into
599 <p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the
600 help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output.
601 The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about
602 #including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The
603 <a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading
604 of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for
605 good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion
606 at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p>
608 <hr><b>November 18, 2013</b>
609 <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." -
610 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
612 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.7.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.7</a> is based on
613 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p>
615 <p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted
616 reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from
617 pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some
620 <p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going
621 into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted
622 dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and
623 an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p>
625 <p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer
626 added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem.
627 William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input
628 (the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug
629 where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault).
630 I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using
631 the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a
632 synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with
633 $CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted
634 a typo in the web page.</p>
636 <p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from
637 bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by
638 --longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal
639 querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a
640 debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply).
641 The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and
642 micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite
643 now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p>
645 <hr><b>September 17, 2013</b>
646 <blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number."
647 Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway
648 station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function,
649 and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
652 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on
653 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p>
656 several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han
657 submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and
658 a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted
659 acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p>
661 <p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker).
662 The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah"
663 instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in.
664 Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain
665 other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who
666 heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID
667 namespace support.</p>
671 <p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should
672 probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd,
673 dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from
674 Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet),
675 syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar,
676 test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E.
677 M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p>
679 <p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't
680 ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig
681 and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up
682 logger and syslogd...</p>
684 <p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory,
685 but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du,
686 expand, and touch.</p>
688 <h3>Infrastructure</h3>
690 <p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the
691 multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes,
692 OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a
693 command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If
694 you're curious, you can do:</p>
703 PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break
706 <p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p>
709 <p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this
710 time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p>
712 <p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions
713 not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains
714 functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit).
715 This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p>
717 <p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude
718 logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts
719 should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ;
720 option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E.
721 --color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p>
723 <p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf
724 does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it
727 <p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid().
728 It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite
731 <p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly
732 linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are
735 <p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag
736 (-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables)
737 that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept
738 into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler,
739 "-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p>
743 <p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to
744 finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f
745 someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once).
746 Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p>
748 <p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that
749 python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks
750 for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer
751 then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p>
754 pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some
755 configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p>
757 <p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and
758 a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p>
760 <p>The new function xexec_optargs()
761 replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs
762 during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p>
764 <p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which
765 didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup
766 between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh
767 command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p>
769 <p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't
770 delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm
771 should now be fixed.</p>
774 <hr><b>July 26, 2013</b>
775 <p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git
776 mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the
777 mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches
778 against it and post them to the list.</p>
780 <hr><b>July 2, 2013</b>
781 <blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You
782 should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people
784 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
786 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on
787 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds
788 uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by
789 default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and
790 enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups".
791 Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv".
794 <p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and
795 each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help"
796 and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p>
798 <p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client,
799 logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup.
800 Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up.
801 (It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p>
803 <p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach
804 more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The
805 <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis
806 of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p>
808 <p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected,
809 condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught
810 -l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices.
811 Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking),
812 and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no
813 corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work).
814 Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham
815 fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output
816 field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means
817 to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda
818 moved file permission display code to lib so ls and
819 stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the
820 last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it
821 (ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user).
824 <p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global
825 variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc
826 debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and
827 that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of
828 just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking
829 against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes
830 for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes
831 various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical
832 (breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names).
834 <p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build
835 system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The
836 release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control.
837 Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p>
840 <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
841 BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first
842 paragraph now says:</p>
844 <blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this
845 software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote>
847 <p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this
848 permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all
849 copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects
850 that 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
851 both 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
852 less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate
853 the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p>
855 <p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more
856 or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it
857 BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p>
859 <hr><b>March 21, 2013</b>
860 <p>Video of my ELC talk
861 "<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>"
862 is up on youtube. Related materials include the
863 <a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an
864 <a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p>
866 <p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about
867 the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p>
870 <li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li>
872 <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li>
873 <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li>
875 <li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li>
877 <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li>
879 <li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li>
880 <li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li>
881 <li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li>
883 <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li>
884 <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li>
886 <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li>
887 <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li>
894 <hr><b>March 14, 2013</b>
895 <blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." -
896 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
898 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on
899 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding
900 the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p>
902 <p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes
903 getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds.
904 "id -Gn root" should now print root's groups
905 instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under
906 Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you
907 can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p>
909 <p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending".
910 Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig.
911 Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig
912 should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p>
914 <p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries
915 (klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p>
917 <hr><b>January 18, 2013</b>
918 <blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
920 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on
921 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There
922 are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the
923 <a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p>
925 <p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s
926 and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to
927 kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite.
928 Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p>
930 <p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and
931 readlink commands. The segfault in ls
932 happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the
933 default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an
934 extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing
935 a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath()
936 code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test
937 suite checks for it).</p>
939 <p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the
940 error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's
941 still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error
942 bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That
943 means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right
944 error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.)
945 Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG
946 doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with
947 at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic
948 (and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma).
949 dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree
950 functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using
951 libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means
952 it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p>
954 <p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that
955 disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back
956 to -Os by default now.</p>
958 <hr><b>December 15, 2012</b>
959 <blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a
960 thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly
961 go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
962 </p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
964 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on
965 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is
966 just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal
967 Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's
968 a new stable version.</p>
970 <p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch
971 (from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a
972 bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8
973 support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option.
974 Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof.
975 The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports
978 <p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library,
979 and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel
980 features we depend on start to drop out).</p>
982 <p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per
983 level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more
984 than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out,
985 or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an
986 earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README,
987 the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory
988 (so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p>
990 <p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist().
991 Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with
992 full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to
993 stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing
996 <p>The open group broke their website so the
997 <a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008
998 now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with
999 pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while
1000 I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p>
1002 <p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant
1003 because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current
1004 implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option
1005 to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks,
1006 but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024
1007 filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p>
1009 <hr><b>November 13, 2012</b>
1010 <blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins."
1011 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
1013 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on
1014 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p>
1016 <p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and
1017 Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and
1018 md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix,
1021 <p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by
1022 default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name.
1023 Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p>
1025 <p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into
1026 "posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008,
1027 the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig
1028 and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on).
1029 An android directory is planned (see the updated
1030 <a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p>
1032 <p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's
1033 global block are now automatically generated, commands should
1034 #define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that
1037 <p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and -
1038 in them, such as switch_root.</p>
1040 <p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of
1041 uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers.
1042 The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
1043 properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
1044 fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage
1045 calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp
1046 and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces
1047 break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
1048 properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
1049 fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib
1050 fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary
1051 on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending
1052 on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in
1053 a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking
1054 partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts:
1055 this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it
1056 wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite
1057 some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to
1058 successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc
1059 versions was added to portability.h.</p>
1061 <p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a
1062 rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All
1063 the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards
1064 document, where applicable.</p>
1066 <p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into
1067 a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p>
1069 <p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're
1073 <hr><b>July 23, 2012</b>
1074 <blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys
1075 out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked
1076 out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
1078 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on
1079 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p>
1081 <p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from
1082 the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p>
1084 <p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed
1085 taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han
1086 contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a
1087 case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p>
1089 <p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the
1090 <a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and
1091 <a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option
1092 to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime),
1093 fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the
1094 corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding
1095 glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing
1096 pending output on exit.</p>
1098 <hr><b>June 25, 2012</b>
1099 <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>
1101 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit
1102 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's
1103 mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than
1104 x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which
1105 now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test
1106 suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the
1109 <p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here
1110 it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40
1111 pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p>
1114 <hr><b>June 12, 2012</b>
1115 <blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that
1116 he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the
1117 wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was
1118 muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had
1119 always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely
1120 the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
1122 <p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>,
1123 so here it is, based
1124 on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the
1125 statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should
1126 actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting
1129 <p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development
1130 doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course.
1131 The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which
1132 threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit
1133 more frequent from here on.</p>
1135 <p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory
1136 tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that
1137 which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p>
1139 <p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown,
1140 chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if
1141 you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug
1144 <p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and
1145 mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint,
1146 vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups.
1147 Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p>
1149 <p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell
1150 wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove
1151 deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and
1152 musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got
1153 some cleanups and bugfixes.</p>
1155 <p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not
1156 to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's
1159 <p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now,
1160 yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the
1161 SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox
1162 multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer
1163 segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full
1164 posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next
1167 <p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros
1168 for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue
1169 is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p>
1171 <p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built
1172 Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that
1173 'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing.
1174 (The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted
1175 yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before
1176 1.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p>
1179 <hr><b>March 3, 2012</b>
1181 <blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral
1182 without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them.
1183 Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking
1184 for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p>
1187 <p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based
1188 on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>. This
1189 time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt
1190 binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p>
1192 <p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I
1193 have not quite been keeping up.)</p>
1195 <p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod,
1196 insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename. Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln,
1197 realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall. Daniel
1198 Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests
1199 for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp.
1200 Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed
1201 cross compiling to work more reliably.</p>
1203 <p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's
1204 code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new
1205 code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python
1208 <p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from
1209 Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott,
1210 more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano
1211 Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and
1214 <p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link,
1215 dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months
1216 and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p>
1219 <hr><b>February 12, 2012</b>
1221 "for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at
1222 least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two
1223 important respects..."</p>
1224 <p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
1226 <p>Here's the first BSD licensed release,
1227 <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization
1228 point than anything particularly useful. 47 commands in a reasonably
1229 ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially
1230 finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several
1231 patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p>
1233 <p>More to come...</p>
1236 <p><b>November 15, 2011</b> - Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2
1237 clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line
1238 implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p>
1240 <p>More to come...</p>
1244 <p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p>
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