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="12-10-2017" /><a href="#03-10-2017"><hr><h2><b>October 12, 2017</b></h2></a> 12<blockquote><p>Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went 13mad now?</p> 14<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 15</blockquote> 16 17<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.5.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.5</a> 18(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.5>git commit</a>) 19is out.</p> 20 21<p>This is another <b>mostly bugfix release</b>. I delayed it a bit trying to get some 22of the many half-finished projects (dd, ping, lsof, iconv, cut, sysconf, 23the cp --parents option...) finished/promoted/tested, but decided adding big 24things at the end of the dev cycle would be too destabilizing.</p> 25 26<p>A couple <b>new features</b> slipped in anyway. Ilya Kuzmich added head -c 27and strings -t (and corrected strings' output in a couple places). Elliott 28Hughes taught file to recognize Macintosh (Mach-O) binaries.</p> 29 30<p><b>NOTE</b>: the chrt command is broken when built against musl-libc 31because that project's maintainer decided he didn't like the system calls 32it depends on, so he 33<a href=https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/commit/?id=1e21e78bf7a5>removed 34them from his libc</a>. The prebuilt binaries are built against musl, 35so the chrt command there will always say -ENOSYS. (It works fine built against 36glibc, and presumably bionic or uClibc.)</p> 37 38<p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Remounting (mount -o remount,rw) should work properly now, 39and we fixed another place ps was segfaulting when /proc 40entries vanished out from under us (a hard to hit race condition 41mostly noticeable in long-running "top" exiting; error value was treated 42as a pointer). Elliott Hughes fixed a -Wformat warning in expr.c, 43and made xargs split the command 44line at ARG_MAX (which is 1/4 the stack size ulimit, which normal users 45can arbitrarily increase but execve() will complain if they don't). 46Josh Gao made netcat -l exit after handling a request, and reported a 47seq bug (seq "1000000 10000001" output 1e+06, fixed now). Zach Riggle fixed a 48broken URL in the README. Rob fixed env -0 checking the flag wrong so 49it didn't work in combination with other flags (typo).</p> 50 51<p><b>Plumbing</b>: 52Replaced mbrtowc() with a new utf8towc() that doesn't have a context 53struct or care about locale. A bugfix in comma_scan() (wasn't removing an entry at the end 54of the list) is why remount _sometimes_ worked (depending on argument 55order), xgetaddrinfo() is now separate from xconnect(), 56atolx_range() learned the w (word=2) suffix, and b is now (block=512) instead 57of (byte=1).</p> 58 59<p><b>Build</b>: Patrick Oppenlander added a workaround for a bug in config2help.c 60that resulted in segfaults on newer toolchains. (It was actually a use 61after free error; the build infrastructure isn't nearly as heavily audited as 62code that gets installed on the target; oops.) A new GITHASH 63environment variable can force the build version from 64the command line, and the build checks for .git in the top directory 65before asking git what our version is (so it isn't confused by ../../.git 66in an enclosing directory). Added a build #warning about musl intentionally 67breaking chrt (as with nommu fork() musl now provides a broken 68stub function so compile-time probes for its existence think it's there, and 69you can't run the result to test behavior when cross compiling).</p> 70 71<a name="19-06-2017" /><a href="#19-06-2017"><hr><h2><b>June 19, 2017</b></h2></a> 72<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. 73To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.</p> 74<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 75</blockquote> 76 77<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.4.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.4</a> 78(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.4>git commit</a>) 79is out. No new commands this time, but 80<b>chrt</b> and <b>dmesg</b> got promoted out of pending.</p> 81 82<p><u>New features</u>: 83Rob rewrote paste, which should work much better now, and added grep 84-M and -S to match and skip wildcards respectively (useful with -r). 85Elliott's updated dmesg has -T and --color. The file 86command can recognize gzip now, uptime grew -s, date grew %N, env knows - as a first argument 87means -i (posix!) and grew -0, ls defaults to -b 88instead of -q now when there's a tty, and ls has a new -ll option (with 89--full-time as a compatibility synonym) showing nanoseconds and (for some 90reason) timezone. (Why do individual files have timezones?) Elliott added 91"uudecode -o -" support. Illya Kuzmich taught head -v and -q. The cpio 92code no longer adds the "TRAILER!!!" entry by default (initramfs extractor 93doesn't care) without which you can concatenate cpio archives with "cat". 94(Use the new --trailer option if you want the legacy behavior.) 95In pending, fdisk compiles now and tar understands bzip2.</p> 96 97<p><u>Build</u>: 98The "make install_airlock" target now symlinks bc from the host because 99the kernel <a href=https://landley.net/notes-2013.html#28-03-2013>inexplicably</a> 100needs that to build. This was motivated by 101<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a>, which builds under 102a toybox airlock directory.</p> 103 104<p>Lots of work on the test suite, mostly from the Android guys who are now 105running it under Android. This fixed several existing tests that didn't 106pass, made more tests run on a toybox-only system, and so on. The test suite 107infrastructure now has a second testing function, 108"testcmd", which supplies the command name being tested (bypassing 109shell builtins).</p> 110 111<p>Various android build and config fixes, getting closer to being able 112to let android someday use scripts/make.sh instead of generated/* snapshots. 113Also more work into building under android's NDK; not quite there yet 114but much closer. 115Use nproc in scripts/make.sh detect available processors (so you can control the SMP level with taskset). 116Removed the old uClibc compatibility glue, it's been 5 years since their 117<a href=http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2016-December/180102.html>last release</a>.</p> 118 119<p>The new config option TOYBOX_PEDANTIC_ARGS checks arguments when there 120are no arguments, so things like "uptime" no longer silently ignore arguments 121you pass but instead refuse to run.</p> 122 123<p><u>Docs</u>: 124The FAQ now has more than one entry. Commands no longer output the full 125help text for argument errors but instead just say "See %s --help" with the 126command name (in addition to the actual error message). 127Elliott did a big period-ectomy on all the --help text, and 128we cleaned up some tab/space inconsistency. The 129non-html help -a output now has separators with the command name. 130The top/iotop and pkill/pgrep help text now describe a lot more of what 131the commands can do. Twitter's code of conduct page went down so we 132mirrored the text locally.</p> 133 134<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 135Fixed a race condition in ps/top where a process that exited right as we 136read its data returned a different error value than we were expecting (which 137was causing long-running top instances to occasionally exit), 138mount now gives an error if it can't autodetect the filesystem 139type, ps no longer queries the terminal size when output isn't to a tty 140(so "ps -A | cat" doesn't vary), date's chkmktime() was replaced with 141simple range checks for fields (to avoid false positives from things like 142timezones and daylight savings time), removed %s from date's help (we 143didn't implement it, we have @seconds[.nanoseconds] instead), fixed 144zcat's buffer flush logic (which was always failing on files larger 145than 32k), and factor now detects requests for numbers >64 bits and fails 146loudly instead of producing incorrect answers. 147Elliott fixed touch -a/-m (they were backwards), and allowed ':' in 148setprop's property names. Grep now exits with 2 for errors (so -q can 149distinguish "didn't find" from "didn't work"), doesn't stop on symlinks 150that point nowhere (there was an error_exit() that should just be a warning), 151and provides error messages for files we could open but not read.</p> 152 153<p><u>Library</u>: 154New library functions: strend() complements strstart(), minof()/maxof() 155are min/max macros that evalute arguments once and autodetect type (why 156isn't this in libc?), xmmap() checks MAP_FAILED (which is not NULL).</p> 157 158<a name="21-02-2017" /><a href="#21-02-2017"><hr><h2><b>February 21, 2017</b></h2></a> 159<blockquote><p>Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the 160Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention 161away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.</p> 162<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 163 164<p>Despite everything, <a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.3.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.3</a> 165(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.3>git commit</a>) 166is out. The <u>new commands</u> this time are <b>ftpget</b>, <b>ftpput</b>, <b>microcom</b>, and <b>ascii</b>.<p> 167 168<p>We also had two command _demotions_ out of defconfig: 169<b>hostid</b> got moved to toys/example and 170switched to "default n" because despite <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/gethostid.html>still being in posix</a> 171the concept of a unique 32 bit number identifying a system is something 172Linux outgrew about the time Pauline Middelink wrote the first IP 173Masquerading code. And Elliott did a complete rewrite of <b>dmesg</b> introducing 174two codepaths that I didn't get a chance to unify and didn't want to 175hold up the release for, so that's back in pending.</p> 176 177<p><u>New features</u>: Rob added units to <b>find</b> -atime and friends 178(with the legacy -amin alias). Elliott added color and -w to dmesg, fallocate 179-o, and improved file's ELF parsing. Steve Muckle added -d and finit_module 180support to modprobe. Rob and Elliott tweaked the 181ps/top display format a bit more (extending the USER field from 8 to 18 chars 182and putting + at the end of string fields that got truncated). 183df -a isn't entirely new, but wasn't documented and needed a bugfix.</p> 184 185<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 186Last release broke oneit because -c didn't get moved to xopen_stdio() (oops). 187Rob and Elliott simultaneously spotted ps padding each line to 99999 188chars when there's no tty (serial console or adb); now it pads to 80 in 189that case but also switches on -w to avoid field truncation. The "tty" 190field also sometimes had trailing debris (that's fixed now). And "top" was 191endlessly redrawing with out tty because receipt of the ANSI size probe 192results would set SIGWINCH, and handling that sent another ansi probe. (Sigh.) 193And while we're there, replace "ADDR" with "BIT" in ps -l so there are 194more than 4 chars left for the "CMD" field on 64 bit systems.</p> 195 196<p>Izabera pointed out that split -b and -l can't mix, and suggested seq should 197multiply to avoid accumulating rounding errors from repeated fractional 198increments. Wang Xiao Jian fixed a bug in sort -k. 199Elliott let getprop use the @ character in property names, and 200Dimitry Ivanov removed the name length limit for system properties. 201Elliott also improved some error reporting and improved top -H's display 202of thread names. 203 204<p>Josh Gao pointed out that recursive operations on . and .. could be ignored 205in chmod -R (and the resulting generic fix to dirtree_notdotdot() fixed 206it in several other places).</p> 207 208<p>Justin Cormack caught tar producing a warning to stdout that screwed up 209"tar c" to stdout. 210Rob fixed an option parsing bug (where switching off a --longopt in menuconfig 211confused the parser), and another one where an option excluding itself 212(ala "abc[-ab][!abc]" with "command -a -b") would segfault.</p> 213 214<p>There's some sort of gcc stack over-optimization bug where musl-libc's 215version of vfork() doesn't get marked with attribute(returns_twice) so 216stack varabiles in the same function after that get semi-randomly overwritten 217when the optimizer decides to reclaim the space. So add the attribute 218to the function the XVFORK() wrapper macro calls. (It's a nommu thing.)</p> 219 220<p>Fixed a couple variable size mismatch bugs that were only tested on 64 bit 221(printf %x 64) or only tested on 32 bit (modprobe), removed some 222unnecessary casts in stat.</p> 223 224<p>Continuing attempts to build under Android NDK brought up that posix 225defines the global 'stdout' as a macro, which older versions of bionic 226turned into an array member, but a function was using it as an argument 227name. (This worked in the AOSP build because it only builds against current 228bionic, where there's a global 'stdout'.)</p> 229 230<p>Several commits argued with clang's warning generation, eventually 231settling on a variant of __attribute__((__shut_up__)).</p> 232 233<p>Android should no longer give spurious error messages 234when you "ps -A | head" about EPIPE on output. (Older versions of bionic 235set an error handler on SIGPIPE, but it shouldn't do that now. More recent 236versions of adb set the SIGPIPE handler to SIGIGN instead of SIGDFL, 237leading to write returning an error message instead of silently killing 238the program. So we set it back to the default.)</p> 239 240<p><u>Docs</u>: 241Removed website link to the gmane archive (which didn't survive gmane's 242change of ownership). The FAQ now answers a _second_ question. (Woo!) 243Some roadmap updates.</p> 244 245<p><u>Build tweaks</u>: 246Upgraded "make install_airlock" target to only warn about missing 247commands (unless $PEDANTIC is set) when it sets up the hermetic build 248path. (The plan is still to implement everything but the toolchain 249binaries in toybox, but in the meantime we're symlinking other stuff from 250the $HOST that isn't ready yet. See 251<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> for an example using 252this.)</p> 253 254<p>Elliott and Rob continue to poke at building toybox with Android's NDK, 255but it's a work in progress (<a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-December/008767.html>thread</a>). Various changes 256removing libcutils dependencies and adding an selinux dependency to getprop 257are fallout from this.</p> 258 259<p>Cross-compiling from Macs needs to use "gsed" instead of apple's 260version, so teach the build to use that name if it exists in the $PATH. 261If you try to build without running config first, you should get better 262error reporting now. Added a workaround for Centos' broken "which" command 263producing output when it _can't_ find a name in the $PATH.</p> 264 265<p><u>Library</u>: 266The new dirtree flag DIRTREE_PROC skips non-numeric entries so things 267like ps and top can scan /proc more efficiently.</p> 268 269<a name="21-10-2016" /><a href="#21-10-2016"><hr><h2><b>October 21, 2016</b></h2></a> 270<blockquote><p>Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat, 271we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your 272own problem.</p><p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 273 274<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.2</a> 275(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.2>git commit</a>) 276is out.</p> 277 278<p>During this development cycle, Elliott Hughes <a href=http://androidbackstage.blogspot.com/2016/07/episode-53-adb-on-adb.html>got interviewed 279on the ADB podcast</a> 280and 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>). 281Both talk about toybox and many other things. 282The web page also grew a new <a href=faq.html>FAQ page</a>, currently with 283just the one.</p> 284 285<p>New comands added to defconfig are <b>tunctl</b>, 286<b>log</b>, <b>start</b>, <b>stop</b>, and <b>sendevent</b>. 287The commands <b>file</b> and <b>netstat</b> got promoted out of pending. 288Pending added <b>chrt</b>, <b>setfattr</b>, and <b>getfattr</b>, and saw 289a lot of cleanups to diffstat and dd but not enough to promote them to 290defconfig yet. A new toys/net directory was added, moving ifconfig, netcat, 291netstat, rfkill, and tunctl there so far.</p> 292 293<p><b>Upgrades</b>: All commands now parse --version when they understand 294--help, but "true" and "false" should now ignore their arguments entirely. 295We taught stat to handle "%12x" and "%.12x" printf-style escapes, which 296apparently other versions do. The ifconfig output now shows the interface's 297device driver. Added patch -d and --dry-run, wc can now do -cm together, 298find has a NOP -noleaf so scripts that use that don't break, add -c to md5sum 299and sha1sum. Elliott taught ps to treat extra aguments as additional -p 300pids, implemented xxd -s, did a number of upgrades to file (added -HL, 301support for ar files, improved ELF support to report android API level 302and stripped/not stripped and it no longer prints a guessed build ID type). 303Elliott also added optional build-time support for using openssl's 304assembly-optimized md5sum/sha1sum implementations (leading to a new 305<a href=design.html>design</a> policy on shared libraries).</p> 306 307<p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Too many fixes to "ps" and "touch" to list, from both 308Elliott and Rob. Rob taught sed to handle s/[[:space:]/]// type sequences 309properly, switched grep to a better 310workaround 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, 311made du max out at 2 terabytes instead of 2 gigabytes on 32-bit systems 312(it was always designed to, but was missing a typecast), 313fixed the option parsing infrastructure (config options that remove command 314line options got the placeholders wrong), fix to printf for printing 315octal digits and handling the (posix-mandated) difference between %b and 316non-%b octal output, reading from "-" no longer closes stdin when done, 317netcat -L works with nommu (although it may need more portability work), 318and you can now "make test_scankey" if you want to. Several commands 319(stat, makedeves, chgrp, cp, find) handled user name lookup failure badly 320(stat was segfaulting if you interrogated a file belonging to a nonexistent 321user, "chown 12345 file" errored out if you didn't have that user 322in /etc/passwd... now they should all print/accept the number when 323appropriate). "LC_ALL=C ls -Cs --color" produces the same output 324as other versions (two spaces padding, -k hardwired on).<p> 325 326<p>Kyungsik Lee fixed a bug 327in cp (readlink() doesn't actually null terminate the string it reads in), 328Elliott Hughes made pgrep/pkill return success/failure, fixed trailing 329whitespace in netstat, fixed a SMACK symbol conflict due to linux/xattr.h 330changing, fixed ls -sh, and added a lot of 331stuff to the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap page</a>. 332Izabera pointed out cmp -l and -s can't be selected at the same time, 333that timeout was never actually checking -v, that ls should default to -q 334when output is to a tty, and that "file -" would sometimes try to open "-" 335instead of stdin. 336Usischev Yury pointed out a use after free error, and that id shouldn't 337call exit() directly. Matthias Urhahn pointed out that stat(2) returns 338hardwired 512-byte units, so stat.c was wrong. David Hedges pointed out 339that route could only handle 10 character interface names when the kernel 340can do 15 (it's still in pending for a reason, but fixed). Evgenii 341Stepanov found and helped diagnose one of the more subtle ps bugs fixed 342this time around.</p> 343 344<p>Calling "make test_blah" no longer causes make to error out if the last 345test fails (and thus returns a nonzero error code). 346Building single commands and the multiplexer used to require a "make clean" 347between them (because they had different config files both of which were older 348than generated/config.h so it didn't get rebuilt; now it just always 349rebuilds it).</p> 350 351<p>The defconfig build is now slightly less broken on older centos versions 352(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> 353 354<p>Several commands were over-using xprintf(), which flushes its output 355to check for error (something you only need to do maybe once per line, 356and even then maybe only in loops because xexit() flushes and checks 357ferror() for you and adjusts the exit code if we wrote stuff to stdout 358that couldn't be printed). Lots of little flushes are inefficient, 359so most things can use normal printf(). (Retransmission 360of short writes is presumably libc's problem since it's buffering the 361output and all.)</p> 362 363<p><b>Library:</b> 364New library functions readlink0() and readlinkat0() which properly null 365terminates the symlink value (which the stock libc function inexplicably 366doesn't). 367The new do_lines() function interates reading lines from a filehandle 368and calling a function on each line. 369New function pollinate() factoring out netcat's poll() loop so things 370like telnet can use it. 371New functions getusername() and getgroupname() return a 372char * given a uid/gid (and return a string representation of the number 373if the lookup fails), and xgetpwnamid/xgetgrnamid were renamed to 374xgetuid/xgetgid and now return an integer instead of a struct (also helping 375handle lookup failures, you can still return the uid/get for "12345").</p> 376 377<p>Switched atolx() to use long long internally. 378Renamed xopen() to xopen_stdio() and made a new xopen() that never returns 379stdin, stdout, or stderr (duping /dev/null into the filehandles as necessary). 380New function xopenro() opens a file read only with one less argument, and 381understands that "-" means stdin. New flag WARN_ONLY tells these functions 382to just print a warning on failure, and return -1 instead of exiting. 383Misc new functions like openro() which defaults to the WARN_ONLY behavior 384and notstdio() which dup()s a filehandle up beyond stdin/out/err backfilling 385with /dev/null as necessary. The WARN_ONLY flag let us remove the failok 386argument from loopfiles().</p> 387 388<p>New TOYFLAG_NOHELP disables --help processing (which "true" and "false" 389should not do).</b> 390 391<p>The test suite now has NOSPACE=1 to ignore whitespace (using diff -b to 392check results), which helps TEST_HOST pass the same tests as toybox. 393Fixes to chattr and date tests. It also has a new variable $C with the 394absolute path to the command being tested (bypassing shell builtins), 395and a function testcmd() which is just like testing() except it prepends 396the command name ($C) to the test command line as well as the test 397description.</p> 398 399<a name="02-06-2016" /><a href="#02-06-2016"><hr><h2><b>June 2, 2016</b></h2></a> 400<blockquote><p>When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but 401highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic 402analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental 403signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's 404brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows 405quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of 406liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.</p> 407<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 408 409<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.1</a> 410(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.1>git commit</a>) 411is out. (Yes, I forgot to update the --version string, but I already 412uploaded the <a href=downloads/binaries/0.7.1>binaries</a>.)</p> 413 414<p>The website has https support now, you can "make cat ps ls" 415to get standalone commands (and "make list list_pending" to see what's 416available), and a whole lot of bugfixes and new options to existing 417commands.</p> 418 419<h2>New Commands</h2> 420<p>Rob implemented <b>ulimit</b>. In pending, Elliott Hughes implemented 421file. and Lipi Lee implemented a simple wget. (Pending also had minor 422cleanups to more and lsof, but no promotions this time around.)</p> 423 424<h2>New Options</h2> 425<p>Izabera implemented env -u, suggested adding seq -w, made factor 426use full unsigned 64 bit math even on 32 bit platforms, pointed out base64 427-w0 should disable wrapping, and sped up wc -c. 428Elliott Hughes added mount -o relatime, xxd -p -r, and od -w. 429Sameer Pradhan (or possibly Bilal Qureshi) suggested adding stat -tL -c %m%t%T. 430Tom Cherry added getprop -Z. Paul Barker added hostname -b and -F. 431Rob added ls -b, made ls -q work with utf8, 432made sed -f - read from stdin, and added top -O (like ps -O).</p> 433 434<p>Elliott and Rob <b>added Thread support to ps and top</b>, 435with -o TID, TNAME. We also added -o PCY (android scheduling policy), 436-o BIT (process is 32 or 64 bit), and -o TNAME now shows the parent 437command name for threads.</p> 438 439<h2>Documentation</h2> 440 441<p>Rob added the sed invocations to convert tabs/spaces and back to 442design.html. Isaac Dunham updated hexedit's help text. 443Jakob Flierl pointed out a broken URL in the README.</p> 444 445<p>Rob also redid the naming scheme of sed's pattern manipulation code to 446remove the gratuitous references to Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series, since it 447was confusing people.</p> 448 449<h2>Bugfixes</h2> 450 451<p>Grep -H and -n should now work properly with -ABC. Andy Chu pointed out an 452out of bounds access for zero length lines in rev, fixed a buffer overflow 453in diff -r, and fixed operator precedence in expr (although Rob is rewriting 454chunks of expr so toysh can use its plumbing for $(( )) ). 455Patrick Ohly fixed the too-aggressive suid permission dropping logic. 456Josh Gao fixed a segfault when find -iname got no argument, and 457made tail -f work right with just one file argument. 458Tom Marshall cleaned up tar's long filename support and improved 459the tar tests, and reported another find bug (with -iname -o -iname not 460tracking copy lifetimes properly) that got fixed.</p> 461 462<p>Elliott Hughes fixed wc -c to not trust zero length files to actually be 463zero length (/proc does that), fixed "mount -o rw,remount /system" on 464Android, removed trailing spaces on ps -o cmdline, fixed pkill -9 and 465the corresponding tests, made "insmod -" work, fixed top -b and tail -NUM, 466pointed out that ps shouldn't trim numeric fields for display size limits, 467and added some more 468explicit "sort" calls to make pipelines so build tempfiles are easier to cache. 469Rob <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/32b3587af261>fixed an insane sed thing</a> the perl 5.22 build was doing. 470Fixed mount -o to properly pass in leftover string data, and 471<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 472to fix some bitrot in the kernel NFS driver's string parsing attached 473to that message).</p> 474 475<p>George Burgess IV corrected some variable types in traceroute. 476Base64 now wraps == properly. Fixed two bzcat segfaults reported by 477John Regehr. Andy Chu found a segfault in "sed -e 'c\'" with no trailing 478line, and implemented mv -n and cp -n. The cyanogenmod guys pointed out that 479cp -a shouldn't complain if a non-root user can't chown, and we added 480the output path to cp -r error messages while we were there (before was just 481the filename).</p> 482 483<p>Samuel Holland fixed blkid's handling of vfat labels, and 484fixed a segfault when basename was passed an empty string and an empty 485suffix. Davis Mosenkovs fixed touch -t seconds parsing. 486Rob fixed a bunzip bug reported by John Regehr (the bad CRC 487error message was printing a NUL argument).</p> 488 489<p>Not all of the commands build standalone, but more of them do now; 490scripts/single.sh can now build a "mv" that isn't actually "cp". 491The dependencies are more granualr, so "make top; make ps" no longer 492produces a broken ps that ignores -A (because ps.o wasn't getting rebuilt 493even though top had the FLAG macros for -A zeroed).</p> 494 495<h2>Build</h2> 496<p>Rob added a <b>warning when building commands out of 497pending</b>. (The pending directory is full of code that hasn't been 498properly vetted. Use at your own risk.)</p> 499 500<p><b>New build targets let you build individual commands by name</b>, ala 501"make ls cat ps", and you can run the test suite for each standalone 502command with "make test_ls" and such. 503"make list" shows all such standalone commands in defconfig, and 504"make list_pending" shows unfinished commands from toys/pending 505("make list list_pending" shows both together). "make clean" now deletes 506these filenames at the top level, and the corresponding unstripped files 507live in the directory generated/unstripped.</p> 508 509<p>Nicholas Boichat suggested switching make.sh to use $! for process 510enumeration during parallel builds (which is both more efficient and more 511portable), and suggested shell builtin replacements for wc/awk/sed so the 512build loop has fewer forks now.</p> 513 514<p>Lots of work on the test suite, much of it due to Andy Chu. It now 515consistently prints the name of the command being tested at the start of each 516test (and the common infrastructure does that, not each individual test), and 517"make tests" actually runs all the available tests now. 518Seperated pgrep and pkill tests, split lsattr/chattr, added fstype and base64 519tests. The "tests/files" directory now collects files for tests to 520use, with blkid, bzcat, and utf8 subdirectories: the $FILES variable 521gives a path to it, so "$FILES/blkid/ext2.bz2" and so on. 522The testsuite now has test files with 3 different types of "not utf8 output" 523sequences that require escaping, plus some combining character torture 524tests, direction reversals, and so on.</p> 525 526<p>Added dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK to various pending commands that need 527nommu conversion (which should fix the allyesconfig build).</p> 528 529<p>Static builds with selinux should work again.</p> 530 531<h2>Library</h2> 532 533<p>New bufgetgrgid() and bufgetpwuid() functions cache previous lookup info 534rather than repeatedly traversing /etc/passwd and /etc/group (which is slow). 535Added xpipe() to lib to catch pipe creation failure. 536The HELP_ macros generated by config2help.c now use a capital prefix 537to avoid collicing with help_exit() and such.</p> 538 539<p>The dirtree infrastructure got a cleanup pass in preparation for adding 540infinite recursion depth support (needed by rm -r), updated the 541<a href=code.html#ib_dirtree>documentation</a> to describe the new 542semantics (removing dirtree_start() and adding dirtree_flagread()). 543Now dirtree_recurse() takes the new dirfd as an argument.</p> 544 545<p>Split out _xexit() from xexit() and let sigatexit() set multiple 546callbacks.</p> 547 548<p>For years the man pages have said to #include <sys/types.h> to get 549major/minor/makedev but now that glibc 550<a href=https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-11/msg00253.html>has vowed 551to break existing programs</a> and replace it with another nonstandard header 552not in posix or lsb, we added our own functions to lib/ to do the transform 553ourselves (based on what the kernel actually expects).</p> 554 555<h2>Portability</h2> 556 557<p>Debian unstable started needing an extra header #include for some reason, and 558although printf("%.*s", INT_MAX, s) worked fine on Ubuntu 12.04 it 559didn't on 14.04, so added a workaround for that. Typecast a printf because 560wchar_t isn't a rigidly defined size. RLIMIT_RTTIME was 561added to the kernel in 2008 but you can't expect uClibc to have noticed yet, 562nor did it #define MS_RELATIME (added in 2006), or prlimit (2010)... 563(Given the improvements in musl and bionic, uClibc support may be dropped 564in a future release.) Given that the xattr functions were added during 565linux 2.5, we can #include its header unconditionally.</p> 566 567<p>Renamed basename_r() to something else to avoid conflicting with freebsd's 568libc, and both scripts/install.h and scripts/config2help.c no longer include 569toys.h (to make cross-compiling from systems we don't run on easier).</p> 570 571<p>Debian bug 635570 did something unspeakably nonportable, depending on 572"sed -e 'a\'" (with no next line of the pattern, so an unterminated 573continuation) to add a newline to the last line of input if and only if 574that last line of the input didn't have a newline, and to take no other 575action. This is well into "depending on a bug" territory, but we implemented 576it because otherwise Debian's install broke. (Of course this behavior 577is undocumented, non-obvious, and doesn't really make logical sense.)</p> 578 579<p>CONFIG_TOYBOX_NORECURSE now disables the stack measuring logic (which 580was giving some "security" code fits). Also we typecast pointers to (long) 581before comparing them to avoid spurious compiler "optimizations" that 582break the code.</p> 583 584<a name="02-02-2016" /><a href="#02-02-2016"><hr><h2><b>February 2, 2016</b></h2></a> 585<blockquote><p>"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that 586quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with 587you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." 588- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 589 590<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.0</a> 591(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.0>git commit</a>) 592is out.</p> 593 594<p>The new commands in defconfig are <b>iotop</b>, <b>top</b>, <b>pgrep</b>, 595and <b>pkill</b> 596(most replacing corresponding versions from pending). Added grep -ABC, 597swapon -d (discard), mkswap -L (label) and UUID support, and find -delete. 598Izabera added free -h and unshare -f. Josh Gao implemented tail -f. 599Jose Bollo submitted cp --preserve=context,attr. Kylie McClain added 600mktemp -u.</p> 601 602<p>In pending there's the start of a vi command, and Sameer Pradhan contributed 603a new dhcp6. This cycle saw several rounds of route cleanup and a little dhcp 604cleanup, but neither are complete yet. Lipi Lee did some cleanup to netstat.c 605and Elliott Hughes removed warnings from traceroute.</p> 606 607<p>Lots of updates to ps: several new -o options, -k (--sort) -O and -M, 608improved compatibility with Android's historical behavior, and 609extensive internal code cleanup (including the removal of all 610the magic constants).</p> 611 612<h3><b>Website</b></h3> 613 614<p>Dreamhost restored the <a href="#12-21-2015">missing 11 months</a> 615to the mailing list archive, in the process deleting the month after 616that. Now they've asked if I have mbox files archiving the new 617gap (between December 20, 2015 to January 21, 2016, and presumably they 618could also fill in the gap from December 14, 2014 to January 3, 2015 that's 619been there since the last time they did this), 620but due to some gmail filtering I've 621<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2012.html#15-10-2012>never 622been able to disable</a>, my copy of those files is spread among 3 different 623mbox files I'd have to sort/filter/collate. (It's on the todo list.)</p> 624 625<p>Added a code of conduct to the README (we're 626<a href=https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/code-of-conduct>borrowing twitter's</a>) because somebody 627made it necessary.</p> 628 629<h3><b>Bugfixes</b></h3> 630<p>Fixed another sed bug where any ] right after [ was skipped (not just the 631first one in the range, so [[] didn't terminate). Fixed sort -f and added test cases. 632Assume 80 columns in "ls -m | cat", ls -L is no longer backwards, 633and ls of files with no paths no longer uses an uninitialized (zero) dirfd. 634Several bugfixes 635to find (Gilad Arnold fixed -perm, Daniel K. Levy fixed "find . -exec echo {}", 636and while we're there I fixed find --prune, made "find . -execdir 637echo {} + -execdir ls {} +" work, and ripped out the environment size 638measuring code that checked for a 128k limit removed back in linux 2.6.22). 639Elliott Hughes fixed the date command's parsing of 4 digit 640years and documented the %s escape, fixed hwclock -u, and pointed out 641that runcon needs to exec to do its job (not recursively call another 642command_main() in the same process). Tom Marshall reported that blkid was 643handling ext2 wrong. Mike Moreton corrected cpio extraction's uid and gid 644values, and added a --no-preserve-owner option. Fixed the SUID permission 645dropping logic (which was a bit over-zealous, preventing some commands from 646running at all).</p> 647 648<p>I'm told that debian-testing broke its libc so the nsenter build breaks, 649but my attempts to install the debian-testing network cd image under 650qemu keep breaking. Maybe someday they'll fix it enough I can actually 651reproduce the problem. (Debootstrap under unbuntu builds an ubuntu-flavored 652chroot in which toybox builds fine.)</p> 653 654<h3><b>Documentation</b></h3> 655<p>Rewrite of the about.html page, tweaks to design.html, and a re-triage of 656sbase in roadmap.html. Update to mkstatus.py to collate multiple span 657tags with the same id, resulting in a larger status.html page (which 658was previously ignoring some commands in the roadmap).</p> 659 660<p>Expanded the defconfig/allyesconfig/allnoconfighelp text in "make help" 661to explain what they're for.</p> 662 663<h3><b>infrastructure</b></h3> 664<ul> 665<li><p>Expanded toys.optargs to 64 bits so a command can have more than 32 options.</p></li> 666<li><p>Added NOEXIT() wrapper to turn xwrap() functions into warning versions 667using the existing longjump(toys.rebound) infrastructure.</p></li> 668<li><p>Renamed dirtree->data to dirfd and stopped storing symlink length 669into it (this fixed a bug where following symlinks to directories 670didn't give a valid directory filehandle, noticeable with ls -Z).</p></li> 671<li><p>New TAGGED_ARRAY() infrastructure generates index and bitmask macros 672for arrays of structures starting with a name string.</p></li> 673<li><p>New lib/linestack.c for utf8 fontmetrics (draw_str() and utf8len() 674and so on), and for tracking multiple lines of text 675(vi, less, shell history) that need wordwrapping and scrolling up/down.</p></li> 676<li><p>Upgrades to lib/interestingtimes.c: scan_key() now has a timeout 677in miliseconds and recognizes more sequences including ANSI 678window size probes. New utf8 test files in tests/files/utf8 including 679sequence reversing, stacked combining chars, and all three types of 680unprintable sequences (low ascii <32 ala ^X, invalid utf8 sequences ala 681<AB><CD>, and invalid unicode code points ala U+1234).</p></li> 682<li><p>More comma handling code in lib.c: comma_args()</p></li> 683<li><p>Added error_msg_raw() to shut up fortify's endless static checking false 684positives.</p></li> 685<li><p>readfileat() can now realloc() in a loop to read long files 686("zcat | insmod" needed it).</p></li> 687</ul> 688 689<h3><b>Roadmap</b></h3> 690<p>We're getting close to having a self-hosting development environment 691using toybox for the command line. The remaining busybox commands in 692<a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>Aboriginal Linux</a> are:</p> 693 694<blockquote><p><b> 695awk bunzip2 bzcat bzip2 dd diff expr fdisk ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip gzip 696less ping route sh sha512sum tar test tr unxz vi wget xzcat zcat 697</b></p></blockquote> 698 699<p>And the remaining non-busybox commands in Aboriginal Linux's build/host 700directory (from the distcc, genext2fs, e2fsprogs, zlib, and squashfs packagesi) 701are:</p> 702 703<blockquote><p><b> 704mke2fs fsck.ext2 resize2fs distcc genext2fs unsquashfs distccd mksquashfs tune2fs 705</b></p></blockquote> 706 707<p>Squashfs and distcc are probably out of scope for toybox, but mke2fs, 708fsck.ext2, resize2fs, genext2fs, and tune2fs should all be added to the 709above "busybox" replacement list.</p> 710 711<p>Remind me to include this countdown in future releases. Once they've all 712been replaced, the next goal is <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>building AOSP under itself</a>.</p> 713 714<p>See the full <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> and <a href=status.html>status</a> 715pages for more details.</p> 716 717<a name="12-21-2015" /><a href="#12-21-2015"><hr><h2><b>December 21, 2015</b></h2></a> 718 719<p>Yes, 11 months have gone missing from the mailing list web archive.</p> 720 721<p>Yesterday evening Dreamhost's mailman server went down (timing out trying 722to connect). I poked them about it, they 723<a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/678781271670149121>blamed 724DNS</a>, I explained that the hang was _after_ the DNS lookup and 725entered the dig info into the trouble ticket showing the IPs the DNS 726queries were returning, they reinstalled the server at that IP from what I 727assume was their most recent backup, and that's how 11 months of messages 728vanished out of the archive.</p> 729 730<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 731can do. <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>Last time</a> 732this sort of thing <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>happened</a> 733we went back and forth for months, so I added a link to a backup web 734archive (in the nav bar on the left) that isn't controlled by dreamhost, 735and thus doesn't gratuitously lose data on a regular basis. (I note 736the earlier hole in Dreamhost's archive was never fixed either. That 737was data never getting archived, this is a year's worth of data that 738was in the archive until yesterday vanishing after the fact.)</p> 739 740<p>If you're wondering why the <a href=http://lists.landley.net>top level</a> 741list page has been "temporarily disabled" for multiple years now... you'd have 742to ask Dreamhost. I know I have. More than a dozen times.</p> 743 744<a name="03-11-2015" /><a href="#03-11-2015"><hr><h2><b>November 3, 2015</b></h2></a> 745<blockquote><p>"Alright," said Ford. "How would you react if I said that I'm 746not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity 747of Betelgeuse?" Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way. "I don't know," he 748said, taking a pull of beer. "Why - do you think it's the sort of thing you're 749likely to say?" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 750 751<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.1</a> 752(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.1>git commit</a>) 753is out.</p> 754 755<p>We have a new <b>ps</b> command with all the -o fields posix wants (although 756it doesn't accept BSD non-dash option syntax yet), and <b>bunzip2</b> (not just 757bzcat but the proper extract-in-place command). 758Sameer Pradhan added <b>hostid</b> and <b>fsync</b>. 759Elliott Hughes added <b>flock</b>. 760 761<p>The people waiting for <b>human readable number support</b> (du -hH, ls -h, 762and so on) can thank Elliott Hughes for implementing it. (Our output doesn't 763exactly match others' because we our "binary" mode will say 1.0G instead of 7641024M, which is a bug in the other one we didn't emulate.)</p> 765 766<p>The other big news is <b>nommu support</b>, tested on the new 767<a href=http://nommu.org/jcore>jcore</a> processor but presumaby working 768on any nommu system. A few commands don't support nommu yet, but those 769are disabled by dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK in menuconfig when building 770for nommu. The roadmap now has a large section analyzing the uClinux 771project (note that <a href=http://nommu.org>nommu.org</a> is slowly replacing 772<a href=http://uclinux.org>uclinux.org</a> as the standard repository of 773all knowledge and wisdom about nommu. The old site <a href=#12-02-2012>contains 774much that is apocryphal</a>, or at least wildly inaccurate, and the new one 775is trying to improve on that).</p> 776 777<p>Both "make change" and scripts/single.sh (for building standalone commands 778without the multiplexer logic) now use the top level .config 779for toybox global settings such as Linux Security Blanket Module selection, 780(so make defconfig before change now).</p> 781 782<p>Documentation updates to the <a href=code.html>code</a> and 783<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> pages.</p> 784 785<h3>pending</h3> 786 787<p>In the pending directory Sameer Pradhan added tftp, 788and Elliott Hughes sent lsof. Isaac Dunham upgraded mdev, 789reboot, init, login, and modprobe, and fixed a distro-specific build break in 790scripts/mkflags.h. Elliott Hughes and Lipi Lee made netstat -p handle 791command lines longer than 21 characters, and Elliott fixed netstat -e and 792some build warnings. Yeongdeok Suh fixed a warning in dhcpd. 793I started cleanup on pgrep/pkill.</p> 794 795<h3>Command updates, bugfixes, and infrastructure</h3> 796 797<p>The multiplexer's "command not found" error exit is now 127, so now you can't 798distinguish between a command not being found in the multiplexer and 799the multiplexer itself not being found by the shell, because people wanted 800that for some reason.</p> 801 802<p>Elliott Hughes made date reject invalid dates rather 803than set the clock to something weird (setting the clock 100 years into the 804future makes most Linux desktops surprisingly unhappy, and ntpdate won't fix it 805either), fixed several ls -l display issues (user/group field ordering, 806make user/group/lsmcontext left aligned), did the aforementioned 807extensive work on human readable number output, fixed ionice's default 808class, fixed a mv overwrite bug, made df's columns auto-size, added 809--ppid and -Z to ps, and teamed up with Daniel K. Levy to fix 810a segfault in find's handling of -newer -group or -user.</p> 811 812<p>Hyejin Kim added stat -c %T support. Colin Cross worked 813on vmstat fixing 814a header printing bug and calculating the bi and bo columns in the right 815units. Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra 816newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed. 817Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain 818pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax. 819Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows 820all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p> 821 822<p>Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra 823newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed. 824Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain 825pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax. 826Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows 827all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p> 828 829<p>Two large thinko fixes in oneit: -3 was always enabled (which would 830eventually block if the child never read the exiting PID numbers from its file 831descriptor #3 until the pipe filled up), and the signal handlers weren't 832set up right (for requesting semi-graceful halt/poweroff/reboot). 833Calling install without a mode is now 0755, and install -g 0 no longer clashes 834with cp --preserve. Better error message for ls -r on unreadable 835directories, and ls -Z now uses O_PATH (with the /proc/self/fd/%d 836workaround for kernel stupidity as necessary).</p> 837 838<p>Date now understands @unixtime[.fraction] and uses -D for 839the set-side format (matching busybox's extension for this). The seq -f 840string now checks that it's got exactly one %f escape with the correct 841attributes (and a whole bunch of test cases for it). Fixed a bug 842in od that screwed up the position indicator on arm and mips. 843In stat the d/h units moved from %d %D to the default string. 844And patch can now correctly apply hunks with trailing context to the start of 845the file.</p> 846 847<p>The prompt argument moved out of yesno() (the caller can print the prompt 848themselves). Replaced toys.exithelp with help_exit(). Added new 849XVFORK() macro, and xpopen_both() calls /proc/self/exe when passed 850a NULL argv (see cpio -p for example usage). Replaced toys.recurse 851with toys.stacktop so the recurse or re-exec decision is now based 852on bytes of stack space used. Marked a bunch of command-local functions 853static.</p> 854 855<p>New additions to lib/ include strlower(), xconnect(), and the 856aforementioned help_exit(). 857The testsuite now has some infrastructure tests based on "example" 858commands such as toys/examples/test_human_readable.c. 859The login command finally got a long-overdue cleanup (it's one of the 860commands that predate the "pending" directory but were part of the reason 861for it). Hexedit had an 862uninitialized variable (of course gcc didn't spot it, it was too busy 863warning about "may be used uninitialized but never actually is" variables).</p> 864 865<p>Tweaked makefile so 866"make CROSS_COMPILE=prefix-" (as well as "CROSS_COMPILE=prefix- make", 867which still works). Toybox is now installed chmod -w so broken installers 868(like the bunzip2 package's) that try to overwrite existing binaries won't 869knock out the whole of toybox. 870GCC 5.2.0 stopped being able to compile Linux 2.6.12's kconfig, but 871we added a workaround. You can now build uptime without utmpx.h. 872Alejandro Joya pointed out that enabling smack required smack on the host 873as well as target when cross compiling, which is now fixed.</p> 874 875<p>Note: toybox can autodetect nommu support when building with a uClibc 876toolchain 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>, 877but <a href=http://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>with musl-libc</a> 878you'll have to enable CONFIG_TOYBOX_MUSL_NOMMU_IS_BROKEN to work around the 879fact they provide a non-functional fork() implementation that always returns 880-ENOSYS, to prevent you from compile-time probing for nommu support when 881cross-compiling. Unfortunately "preventing you from probing" seems to be 882an explicit policy with musl, they also don't provide an "#ifdef __MUSL__" 883because their library is perfect and you're only ever allowed to work around 884other people's bugs, not theirs. So we have to use menuconfig to manually 885enable musl-specific bug workarounds.</p> 886 887<a name="23-07-2015" /><a href="#23-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2015</b></h2></a> 888<p>I recreated the <a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>0.6.0 source tarball</a> 889(new sha1sum 08fb1c23f520c25a15f262a8a95ea5b676a98d54) 890because I forgot to add --prefix to the git archive command when I updated 891my release script from mercurial, so the files weren't in an enclosing 892directory. (Ooops.)</p> 893 894<a name="19-07-2015" /><a href="#19-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 19, 2015</b></h2></a> 895<blockquote><p> 896The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic 897component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar 898hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it 899around in." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy </p></blockquote> 900 901<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.0</a> 902(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.0>git commit</a>) 903is out. (Yes, git. See the <a href=#05-04-2015>previous news entry</a>.)</p> 904 905<p>Sorry for the unusually long gap between releases. Since last release Ye 906Olde Project Maintainer traveled to japan twice and had two more "once 907a century" floods at home. (Probably a coincidence.) Still catching up.</p> 908 909<h3><b>CELF/ELC talk and Wikipedia[citation needed] article</b></h3> 910 911<p>I gave another State Of The Toybox talk 912(<a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04XwAbtPmAg>video</a> 913<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2015.txt>outline</a>), in which I 914repeat my <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#07-11-2013>perennial</a> 915<a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/557309224535851009>complaint</a> 916that Wikipedia[citation needed] 917<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox>still</a> 918<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#Controversy_over_Toybox>says</a> 919toybox was relicensed before its hiatus, when relicensing was why 920the hiatus ended.</p> 921 922<p>Since Wikipedia[citation needed] seems unable to do the 923<a href=#15-11-2011>most</a> 924<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/log/tip/LICENSE>basic</a> 925<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011>research</a> on 926this point, and has stuck to an incorrect sequence of events for years, 927I've been gradually escalating my attempts to correct them. Toybox 928came out of mothballs in November 2011 <b>because</b> it could be 929relicensed. That's what opened up a new niche busybox wasn't already 930filling with a 10 year headstart.</p> 931 932<a name="asterisk_back" /> 933<p>The article has plenty of smaller issues<a href=#asterisk>*</a>, but 934given that I gave an entire talk at Ohio LinuxFest in 2013 935(<a href=http://landley.net/talks/ohio-2013.txt>outline</a>, 936<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 937my projects, that one bugs me.</p> 938 939<h3><b>New stuff this release</b></h3> 940 941<p>There's a new android menu in menuconfig, and rather a lot of Linux 942Security Module support (Smack for Tizen from Xavier Roche and José Bollo, 943and SELinux for Android from Elliott Hughes; see 944the Security Blanket menu under global settings in menuconfig) has 945trickled in, although there's still more to come.</p> 946 947<p><b>New commands:</b> Added reset, nproc, ionice, and iorenice. 948Elliott Hughes contributed xxd, runcon, 949restorecon, load_policy, getenforce, setenforce, getprop, and setprop. 950Promoted shred, nsenter, and hwclock.</p> 951 952<p>You can once again build catv now the flag infrastructure's been updated to 953let it coexist with cat -v. 954And on a long plane flight I wrote 955hexedit, an interactive hex editor that implements the start of 956cursor control infrastructure (for eventual use by less and vi and shell 957command history and so on).</p> 958 959<p><b>New options:</b> Added sed -E as a BSD-compatible synonym for -r. 960Upgraded oneit with -r (restart), -3 (send exiting PID values to child), 961and signal handling. Added -v option to timeout, -m to mknod, -u to shred, 962-t to dmesg, and -123 to head and tail. Added implicit "." to grep -r without 963any files to work on. Hyejin Kim requested prefix support for truncate -s. 964Greg Hackman added -inum to find. 965Jan Cybulski added the smack side of ls -Z support. Various patches also 966added -Z to mkdir, mknod, and mkfifo. 967Basic cp --preserve support went in, but not yet the xattr/LSM parts.</p> 968 969<p>The toybox command now has a --version option, 970which uses "git describe" if available.</p> 971 972<p><b>Build infrastructure:</b> 973The "make change" target now saves the output of each failed standalone 974command build in a .bad file, and "make defconfig" is quieter now.</p> 975 976<p>Paul Barker submitted a large patch changing command install paths so 977"toybox can be installed alongside busybox without confusing 978update-alternatives". (There's some argument over 979what the right paths should be, and I'm waiting for 980people to tell me what else needs fixing because I have no idea. I've 981been symlinking /bin to /usr/bin since 2002 982<a href=http://landley.net/writing/hackermonthly-issue022-pg33.pdf>for 983historical reasons</a>.)</p> 984 985<p><b>Docs:</b> The repository link now goes to github, with another link 986to the commit rss feed.</p> 987 988<p>Elliott Hughes updated the Android section of the roadmap 989(and he would know). Redid bits of scripts/mkstatus.py to make updating 990status.html easier, and the README is larger.</p> 991 992<p>More description of option parsing in code.html, which now describes the 993FLAG_x macros, switching flag macro sets with FOR_newcommand, how 994configuration zeroes flag macros and using FORCE_FLAGS to suppress the 995zeroing of options shared between commands. Also added description of ";" 996to make --longopts take an optional =value part, and more about TOYBOX_DEBUG 997to check NEWTOY() option strings (otherwise a bad option string makes 998lib/args.c obviously segfault, but doesn't explain why).</p> 999 1000<p>Added a "Why 0BSD?" section to license.html when submitting zero clause bsd
1001to SPDX (according to the pending license spreadsheet, it's been approved for 1002SPDX 2.2).</p> 1003 1004<p>The old list of commands needing cleanup but not in pending was 1005removed from toys/pending/README and instead the issues were added 1006as TODO comments in the individual commands.</p> 1007 1008<p><b>Bugfixes:</b> 1009Fixed mount -a segfaulting without -O (reported by Janus Troelsen), 1010and made it try a "become rw" ioctl() on the block device before falling 1011back to mounting read only (because Android expects that). 1012Fixed printf -- and printf ---. Lots of tweaks to ls -l spacing with 1013different options. Make touch -d and -t actually set time when you don't 1014specify nanoseconds. 1015Fixed a subtle bug where recursive calls (toybox commands that run other 1016toybox commands) weren't resetting all their state. (This manifested as 1017a "no }" error from "find | xargs sed", but could cause other problems.) 1018And David Halls reported another sed bug trying to compile libiconv (which 1019left extra \ at the start of lines in a generated shell script, breaking 1020the build). Output an error message for "cat /mnt".</p> 1021 1022<p>Kylie McClain reported that mktemp broke when $TMPDIR was set to an empty 1023string (which is not the same as unset), that install/find didn't support 1024numeric uid/gids, and that sort -z affects both input and output. 1025Isabella Parakiss fixed a printf.c bug. 1026David Halls fixed bugs in install -D and find -exec. Samuel Holland 1027fixed unshare -r. Hyejin Kim fixed makedevs with a count of 1, fold -w 1028range checking, an error path in scripts/mkflags.c, added -i to dhcpd, 1029and stopped su from prompting the root user for the new user's password. 1030Jan Cybulski spotted wrong indentation when combining ls -s and -i with -C and 1031-x. José Bollo fixed stat %G. Sameer Pradhan fixed a bug in mkfifo -Z.</p> 1032 1033<p>Elliott Hughes asked for a default SIGPIPE handler to disable 1034the signal handler bionic's dynamic loader installs (yes really). Still not 1035100% sure what the correct behavior is there. (Posix is 1036(<a href=http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.standards.posix.austin.general/10915>actively unhelpful</a>, but at least they're taking 1037<a href=http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=789#c1976>years to 1038make up their mind</a>. Elliott also sent patches to fix a typo in 1039useradd.test, add missing arguments to error_exit() calls and clean up 1040printf() format strings, fix an off by one error in human_readable(), 1041fix dmesg -c error reporting, fix a segfault in comma_scan where the option 1042was the last item in optlist (triggered by mount -o ro,remount), fix 1043hwclock -w, made ifconfig print lowercase MAC addresses (it was bothering 1044him), and make terminal_size() read the right environment variable 1045(LINES, not ROWS). And he suggested the test suite notice high command exit 1046values (corresponding to segfault or other signals).</p> 1047 1048<p>People are apparently using toys/pending commands, despite the police tape 1049and flashing lights, so added louder warnings to toys/pending/README. 1050Elliott Hughes fixed various problems with tar, dd, more, and top. 1051Hyejin Kim cleaned up syslogd and dumpleases. Isaac Dunham added hotplug 1052support to mdev. Yeongdeok Suh added RFC-3315 ipv6 support to dhcpd.</p> 1053 1054<p>I rewrote ps.c from scratch (in pending), but it's not ready for real use 1055yet.</p> 1056 1057<p><b>Portability:</b> 1058On the portability front Bernhard Rosenkranzer fixed a problem where the 1059menuconfig code wouldn't compile in C99 mode. (This led to me documenting 1060the craptacular nature of kconfig in a README, and the plan to replace it 1061sometime before 1.0.) Some extra flags to shut up overzealous llvm warnings 1062were added (and have to be probed for because gcc complains about 1063arguments it doesn't recognize even when they switch stuff _off_ using 1064a standard syntax). Don't depend on malloc(0) to return non-null in ls. 1065David Halls fixed some mac/ios portability issues, 1066implying somebody's built at least part of toybox on a mac.</p> 1067 1068<p>Added basename_r() to lib/lib.c because the posix semantics for basename() 1069are stupid but what the gnu guys did to it was appalling. 1070Turns out bionic already had a basename_r(), but posix still doesn't. 1071Fixed it up in portability.h, but this 1072could break more stuff in future. (Correct fix is to lobby posix to add it, 1073which would probably take about 15 years...)</p> 1074 1075<p><b>Infrastructure:</b> 1076The build now checks $LDFLAGS for linker-only flags, and allows the strip 1077command to fail (binflt toolchains provide a strip that doesn't work). 1078Since time.c uses floating point, added TOYBOX_FLOAT dependency in config.</p> 1079 1080<p>There's a lib/lsm.h defining varous inline functions for linux 1081security modules stuff, if (lsm_enabled()) should turn into a compile-time 1082constant 0 and let code drop out when TOYBOX_LSM_NONE selected, but 1083testing against CFG_TOYBOX_LSM_NONE or derived symbols is still useful 1084becuase when it _is_ enabled the probe turns into a system call you 1085don't want to repeat too much.</p> 1086 1087<p>Switched a bunch of commands from signal() to xsignal(). Factored out 1088xgetgrnamid() and xgetpwnamid() into xwrap.c. Make time.c depend on 1089TOYBOX_FLOAT (since it always uses float so shouldn't be available on 1090build targets without even software float). Added readfileat() to lib/lib.c.</p> 1091 1092<p>The dirtree infrastructure now passes in full flags for the old symlink 1093field, and the new DIRTREE_SHUTUP flag disables warnings if a file vanishes 1094out from under you during traverse. New dirtree_start() wrapper to 1095create dirtree root with only two arguments.</p> 1096 1097<p>The not-curses infrastructure introduced by hexedit mostly moved to 1098lib/interestingtimes.c.</p> 1099 1100<a name="asterisk" /> 1101<a href="#asterisk_back" />Asterisk:</a> such when 1102Tim contacted me (my blog says a couple days before nov 13, 2011, I.E. 110311/11/11 not some specific day 2 months later) to ask if I wanted to work 1104on a new project he was proposing called 1105<a href=http://www.elinux.org/Busybox_replacement_project>BentoBox</a> 1106(because I used to do busybox, he'd forgotten toybox existed 1107until I brought it up). And don't ask me what "focuses not on compatibility 1108with its GNU counterparts" means when CP_MORE adds 7 non-posix options 1109and toys/other has 84 commands in neither posix nor LSB. I think they're 1110struggling to explain the difference having dismissed "licensing" as being 1111the reason it started up again after a long hiatus? The reason I don't think 1112GNU is special is there are a half-dozen other independent 1113implementations of the same unix command tools out there (AT&T, 1114BSD, Coherent, Minix, plan 9, busybox, toybox, and several more analyzed in 1115the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a>, and that's ignoring the implementations 1116written for DOS or in assembly over the years). But I do care what 1117Linux From Scratch expects, and if it's 1118<a href=http://archive.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-museum/7.6/LFS-BOOK-7.6-NOCHUNKS.html#ch-tools-gcc-pass1>calling mv -v</a> 1119then I impelement mv -v 1120even if <a href=http://landley.net/toybox/roadmap.html>posix hasn't got 1121it</a>. And I don't know why "gnu counterparts" would describe this when 1122util-linux isn't a gnu package, nor are info-zip, e2fsprogs, kmod, less, 1123procps, shadow, sysklogd, vim, zlib, sudo, dhcpcd...</p> 1124 1125<a name="05-04-2015" /><a href="#05-04-2015"><hr><h2><b>April 5, 2015</b></h2></a> 1126<p>Since <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox/>android</a> and 1127<a href=https://git.tizen.org/cgit/platform/upstream/toybox.git>tizen</a> 1128and <a href=https://github.com/kraj/meta-musl/tree/master/recipes-core/toybox>openembedded</a> 1129and <a href=https://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/toybox>gentoo</a> 1130and so on have all been using Georgi Chorbadzhiyski's git mirror rather 1131than the mercurial repository, I bit the bullet and switched the project's repo 1132<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox>to git</a>. Georgi's 1133<a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>mirror</a> is now pulling from that.</p> 1134 1135<a name="25-02-2015" /><a href="#25-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 25, 2015</b></h2></a> 1136<blockquote><p>"A common mistake that people make when trying to design 1137something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of 1138complete fools."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1139 1140<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.5.2</a> 1141(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1702>commit 1702</a>) is out.</p> 1142 1143<p>New promoted commands: sed (finally fixed enough it builds Linux From 1144Scratch), printf (cleaned up and promoted), shred and 1145base64 (the Tizen guys wanted them), getenforce, setenforce, and chcon (android), 1146mix (promoted with fixes from Isaac Dunham), nsenter (from 1147Andy Lutomirski, merged into unshare).</p> 1148 1149<p>Elliott Hughes submited a bunch of patches to support Android (to 1150both toybox and Bionic libc, which he maintains). On toybox's end this 1151involved a lot of fixups to portability.[ch] and fixes to over a dozen 1152commands, plus several new ones. Other portability fixes included working 1153with buildroot's uclibc fork and building for nommu targets.</p> 1154 1155<p>The new "make change" target builds each toybox command as a standalone 1156binary. Rather a lot of commands that didn't build by themselves (mv depending 1157on cp and so on) were hit with a large rock until they built standalone. 1158This involved rewriting bits of option parsing, more elaborate dependency 1159generation, making each command have its own config 1160symbol and main() function (even when it's just a wrapper calling another 1161command's main()), and so on. Also, some commands can't be built standalone 1162at a conceptual level: "help" describes other enabled commands and "sh" 1163has a number of bulitin commands (cd, exit, set) that require the 1164multiplexer infrastructure, so "make change" filters them out.</p> 1165 1166<p>The mailing list's web archive is still screwed up. Dreamhost has 1167been trying to fix it since approximately September. There are 1168<a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>two</a> 1169<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>other</a> less broken 1170archives, but neither has quite the same UI as mailman.</p> 1171 1172<h3>Bugfixes and tweaks</h3> 1173 1174<p>Cynt Rynt sent in tests for ifconfig, 1175Robert Thompson taught factor to accept whitespace separated arguments, 1176Hyejin Kim pointed out that some of mktemp's longopts were attached to 1177the wrong short options, 1178Luis Felipe Strano Moraes fixed a wrong free() call in bootchartd in pending. 1179Patches from Ashwini Sharma to make "df /dev/node" work, prevent du from 1180looping endlessly following symlinks, and to make expr.c 1181(in pending) understand == and regex matches. (Speaking of expr, it gets 1182priority groupings wrong but the bug was actually in the posix spec's 1183HTML conversion. They fixed the posix spec upstream for us. Still need 1184to fix the expr code, but it's in pending for a reason...)</p> 1185 1186<p>Some commands grew new option flags, such as cp --remove-destination 1187and touch -h.</p> 1188 1189<p>The parallel build has better error reporting now. When toybox needs to 1190re-exec itself to regain suid root permissions and hasn't got the suid bit, 1191it now gives the right error message ("not root" instead of "no such command"). 1192 1193<p>Added a test to "mount" to not mount the same device/directory combination 1194over itself (the OS catches this for block devices, but not for tmpfs). 1195Make blkid distinguish ext3 from ext4. Added catv back into cat (because 1196the Android guys wanted it, and they have historical usage on their side, 1197so...). Handle nanoseconds in touch.</p> 1198 1199<p>Fixed a segfault when CP_MORE was disabled (the resulting option flag list 1200no longer defined -d but still had it in option groups at the end). 1201Workaround for glibc redefining dirname() and basename() to random non-posix 1202semantics because gnu. (They could have created dirname_r() but didn't want 1203to.)</p> 1204 1205<p>Fix an ifconfig test that was preventing assigning an ipv4 address to 1206interface aliases. Several cleanup passes on hwclock but not quite 1207promoted out of pending yet.<p> 1208 1209<p>Fixed a wrong error message in rm (if you had a chmod 000 directory and 1210did rm -r on it without -f, after the prompt it would complain it was a 1211directory, which was not the problem).</p> 1212 1213<p>The gzip compression code now does "store only" output to stdout, for 1214what that's worth.</p> 1215 1216<p>Cleanup mountpoint and expand, and remove them from toys/pending/README 1217(a list of commands that predate the toys/pending directory but needed 1218another pass).</p> 1219 1220<h3>Library and infrastructure:</h3> 1221 1222<p>Reworked the option parsing infrastructure so more commands build 1223standalone (via scripts/single.sh or "make change"). The option flag bit 1224values are no longer packed, it leaves spaces where currently disabled 1225flags go, and you can #define FORCE_FLAGS so disabled flags aren't zeroed. 1226This allows multiple commands to more easily share infrastructure, even if 1227your current flag context is for a disabled command (switched off in config), 1228you can force them to stay on and as long as the flags read the same right 1229to left they'll have the same values.</p> 1230 1231<p>We've started removing use of strncpy() because it's a hugely broken 1232standard C function: the length is the maximum length to _append_, not 1233the size of the destination buffer. It memsets the remaining space it didn't 1234copy ala "memset(dest+strlen(dest), 0, len);" so 1235if you think len is the size of dest you're guaranteed to stomp memory off the 1236end). And if it runs out of space it won't null terminate because reasons. 1237(Meanwhile sprintf("%*s", len, str) is counting wide characters in your current 1238locale, so if you set a locale other than "C" it will also go past your 1239allocated buffer size. Whoever is maintining the C library standards is really 1240bad at strings.) 1241Instead we have xstrncat() which will error_exit() if src+dest+1 doesn't 1242fit in the buffer. (Because randomly truncating input data isn't necessarily 1243an improvement.) And there's always xmprintf().</p> 1244 1245<p>Similarly, strtol() doesn't return an error indicator on overflow, 1246you have to clear and then check errno. So new xstrtol() that cares 1247about overflow.</p> 1248 1249<p>The bionic and musl guys agree faccessat(AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) is not 1250supported, so stop using it.</p> 1251 1252<p>Fixed toy_exec() to detect when argc is in optargs, so we don't 1253need a separate xexec_optargs().</p> 1254 1255<a name="18-02-2015" /><a href="#18-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 18, 2015</b></h2></a> 1256<p>Dreamhost continues to be unable to make mailing list archives work, so 1257here's <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>another 1258list archive</a> with a less awkward interface than gmane.</p> 1259 1260<p>(Neither gives you the convenient historical monthly views of mailman, 1261but I still have hopes dreamhost will someday figure out what they're doing 1262wrong. They've only been trying since October. Last month they did a 1263<a href=http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2015/01/14/discussion-list-hardware-maintenance/>hardware upgrade to fix a software problem</a>, and the stale 1264data loads much faster now, so that's something.)</p> 1265 1266<p>Update (Feb 19): the archive started updating again, by discarding 1267all the pending data. So there are now _two_ giant holes in Dreamhost's 1268web archive, from Dec 15-Jan 3, and then another hole from Jan 16-Feb 18. 1269The relevant messages are in both of the other archives. Here's hoping 1270the chronic archive constipation problem won't happen a sixth time.</p> 1271 1272<a name="30-12-2014" /><a href="#30-12-2014"><hr><h2><b>December 30, 2014</b></h2></a> 1273<p>Due to Dreamhost's <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>ongoing</a> 1274<a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>inability</a> to make mailman 1275work reliably, I've added a link to a backup web archive at 1276<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>gmane</a> to the nav bar 1277on the left.</p> 1278 1279<p>You still subscribe to the list through 1280<a href=http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net>the first link</a>.</p> 1281 1282<p>Update (January 27, 2015): they're <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/558428839462703104>still working on it</a>.</p> 1283 1284<a name="19-11-2014" /><a href="#19-11-2014"><hr><h2><b>November 19, 2014</b></h2></a> 1285 1286<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> 1287 1288<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.1</a> 1289(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1566>commit 1566</a>) is out.</p> 1290 1291<p>It's an interim release, mostly bugfixes. There are several new commands, 1292but they're all in pending.</p> 1293 1294<h3>Development</h3> 1295 1296<p>Finally implemented sed, which is still in pending because although 1297it's feature complete according to posix, and even passes the parts of 1298Busybox's sed test suite that aren't explicitly testing for gnu bugs we 1299don't want to copy, it's not yet good enough to build Linux From Scratch. 1300(The ./configure stages use very long sed scripts. 20 commits worth of 1301implementation and debugging, just under 1000 lines of code, and there's 1302still more to do. We're definitely up to some of the "fiddly" commands now. 1303Did you know "echo hello | sed p - -" segfaults gnu sed in Ubuntu 12.04? 1304Yeah...)</p> 1305 1306<p>Talked with the Tizen developers to follow up on their desire to 1307make toybox a part of the base Tizen system, and got a list of commands 1308to add to the roadmap. The tizen todo list is:</p> 1309 1310<blockquote><p> 1311wget, sha256*, gzip, gunzip, bunzip2, rsync, zdiff*, 1312less, ar, arch, base64, csplit, dir, fmt, join, 1313nproc, shred, shuf, stdbuf, stty, test, tr, unexpand, 1314users, vdir, diff3, sdiff, dosfsck (fsck.vfat), awk, fdisk 1315</p></blockquote> 1316 1317<p>(Most of which was already on the todo list, but it helps prioritize.)</p> 1318 1319<p>Fixed md5sum and sha1sum on big endian systems (reported by James McMechan). 1320Andy Lutomirski fixed unshare's help text and option parsing, 1321and submitted nsenter (a tool to use setns(2)) to pending. 1322Isaac Dunham implemented acpi -ctV options, and spotted the bug that ls -d 1323was inappropraitely following command line symlinks without -H or -L (it 1324should act like ls -l does), and ls -F handles symlinks wrong too. 1325Lukasz Szpakowski sent in two bugfixes to tail.c. Cynt Rynt spotted an 1326unnecessary assignment in lib/password.c.</p> 1327 1328<p>Ashwini Sharma's team was as busy as usual, submitting tr, crontab, and 1329ipcrm, and hwclock to pending, more features to the pending ip.c, and a 1330pile of bugfixes (to chgrp, killall, ifconfig, insmod, 1331losetup, comm, cp, id, xwrap, netcat, modprobe, nohup...) mostly found by 1332static analysis. (These fixes are mostly to seldom-used codepaths like the 1333TOYBOX_FREE config option, but test coverage is always appreciated.) Ashwini 1334also suggested upgrading ln -f to leave the original target alone if link 1335creation fails, and reported that mv -f and -i weren't implemented (now fixed).</p> 1336 1337<p>New config option: TOYBOX_NORECURSE prevents xexec() from making internal 1338function calls (for nommu systems with a finite stack).</p> 1339 1340<p>The "toybox" multiplexer command no longer adds a trailing space to each 1341line of command names, so things like "./toybox | tr ' \n' '|'" to create 1342a grep pattern snippet are easier to do. (Why you'd want to is your business, 1343but the output is tidier now.)</p> 1344 1345<h3>Infrastructure</h3> 1346 1347<p>Isaac Dunham added Android support to portability.h, including compile 1348probes for functions missing from bionic-libc, and annotated the commands that 1349use those functions. We haven't really tested building against bionic, 1350but in theory it's possible now.</p> 1351 1352<p>Running the test suite now color codes the PASS/SKIP/FAIL notifications 1353if output is to a tty. (And in case you missed it last time, VERBOSE=fail 1354to stop at the first failure is really useful.)</p> 1355 1356<p>In loopfiles_rw() use O_CLOEXEC instead of O_RDONLY to request the loop 1357function close filehandles for us. (Otherwise the callback function must 1358close each supplied filehandle itself.)</p> 1359 1360<p>The printf-style escape parsing ("\n" and friends) got factored out into 1361a new unescape() function.</p> 1362 1363<a name="02-10-2014" /><a href="#02-10-2014"><hr><h2><b>October 2, 2014</b></h2></a> 1364<blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. 1365The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss... 1366Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the 1367difficulties." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.<p></blockquote> 1368 1369<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a> 1370(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p> 1371 1372<h3>New commands</h3> 1373 1374<p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands 1375(cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p> 1376 1377<p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now 1378ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth 1379instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving 1380looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to 1381cut, touch, free, and id.</p> 1382 1383<p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini 1384Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded 1385fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code. 1386Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p> 1387 1388<h3>Build infrastructure</h3> 1389 1390<p><b>Parallel builds</b></p> 1391 1392<p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of 1393processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.) 1394Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain 1395about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now 1396gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p> 1397 1398<p><b>Standalone builds</b></p> 1399 1400<p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to 1401build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file 1402selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro 1403for the command. It enables each command's 1404sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build 1405full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when 1406the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro 1407now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY 1408without the NEWTOY</p> 1409 1410<p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that 1411aren't building standalone yet are:</p> 1412 1413<blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos, 1414whoami</p></blockquote> 1415 1416<p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY() 1417entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries 1418that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure 1419is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command 1420is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the 1421code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible 1422to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting 1423design goals in the two contexts.)</p> 1424 1425<p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual 1426commands. 1427 1428<p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p> 1429 1430<p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh 1431containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current 1432configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an 1433exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite 1434got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p> 1435 1436<h3>Internals</h3> 1437 1438<p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking 1439filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now 1440done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added 1441to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now 1442requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false). 1443Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various 1444pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can 1445use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode. 1446Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether 1447we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p> 1448 1449<p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges 1450(which happens when you suid something _other_ than root). 1451The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the 1452command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled), 1453toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse 1454internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth), 1455always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when 1456we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes, 1457dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in 1458error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an 1459option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments 1460saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched 1461off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio. 1462Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall 1463with no arguments (segfaulted).</p> 1464 1465<p><b>Portability</b></p> 1466 1467<p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx 1468to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl 1469maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed 1470instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section 1471to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your 1472build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do 1473a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make 1474it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns 1475requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch 1476to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current 1477musl source control.)</p> 1478 1479<p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have 1480another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p> 1481 1482<p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p> 1483 1484<p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small 1485allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing 1486"$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic 1487is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux 1488filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters 1489we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd), 1490newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in 1491filesystem).</p> 1492 1493<h3>Documentation</h3> 1494 1495<p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html 1496documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently 1497(it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p> 1498 1499<p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup 1500before the pending directory was added.</p> 1501 1502<h3>Test Suite</h3> 1503 1504<p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the 1505testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p> 1506 1507<p>Johan Bergström requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to 1508stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu 1509sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p> 1510 1511<p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat, 1512and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p> 1513 1514<a name="07-07-2014" /><a href="#07-07-2014"><hr><h2><b>July 7, 2014</b></h2></a> 1515<blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: 1516most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many 1517solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely 1518concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd 1519because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were 1520unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1521 1522<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> 1523 1524<p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include: 1525lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs, 1526killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han, 1527sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh, 1528host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p> 1529 1530<p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending): 1531sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5, 1532fallocate, and nbd-client.</p> 1533 1534<p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps, 1535bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd, 1536login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's 1537still more to do on all of those.)</p> 1538 1539<p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against 1540musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't 1541support that target yet.)</p> 1542 1543<p><b>Documentation:</b></p> 1544 1545<p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with 1546a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the 1547"coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show 1548stopper for incoming 1549contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them 1550during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes 1551the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p> 1552 1553<p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the 1554full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p> 1555 1556<p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is 1557a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more 1558elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option 1559parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p> 1560 1561<p><b>Fixes</b>:</p> 1562 1563<p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default 1564output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported 1565bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init() 1566was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound) 1567had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be 1568there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at 1569the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test 1570in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return 1571success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and 1572ferror() from xprintf().</p> 1573 1574<p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff 1575implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some 1576diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from 1577a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops 1578at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set, 1579which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of 1580chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p> 1581 1582<p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final 1583build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of 1584libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p> 1585 1586<p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes, 1587so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities. 1588So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the 1589setup code to setlocale().</p> 1590 1591<p><b>Upgrades:</b></p> 1592 1593<p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it 1594to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also 1595added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database 1596parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p> 1597 1598<p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making 1599it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum 1600for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other 1601implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p> 1602 1603<p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname), 1604the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get 1605a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p> 1606 1607<p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP 1608command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p> 1609 1610<p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always 1611build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p> 1612 1613<p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so 1614we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0 1615filename" actually works again.</p> 1616 1617<p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd, 1618and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill, 1619groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still 1620working to fix them.</p> 1621 1622<p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a 1623dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new 1624generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte 1625to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's 1626initialized to in toy_init).</p> 1627 1628<p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and 1629use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro 1630contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs 1631decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion 1632bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you 1633cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the 1634first one, the build break is now more informative).</p> 1635 1636<a name="20-04-2014" /><a href="#20-04-2014"><hr><h2><b>April 20, 2014</b></h2></a> 1637<blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer 1638which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks 1639had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as 1640far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to 1641turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1642 1643<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on 1644<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And 1645about time too.</p> 1646 1647<p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h, 1648that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text 1649from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines. 1650There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p> 1651 1652<p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the 1653way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the 1654<a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk, 1655Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p> 1656 1657<p><b>In pending:</b> 1658Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more, 1659groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added 1660ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty. 1661Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold. 1662I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in 1663compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side) 1664and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p> 1665 1666<p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot, 1667cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus 1668in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some 1669work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations 1670documented what their output actually meant).</p> 1671 1672<p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to 1673handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the 1674fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h 1675options (all commands, html output). 1676Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually 1677set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross 1678compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween 1679sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code. 1680Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options 1681to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and 1682allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded 1683tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after 1684that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting. 1685Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of 1686pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified 1687find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on 1688the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions 1689now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with 1690aliasing.</p> 1691 1692<p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you 1693can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same 1694.c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the 1695bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example. 1696i 1697<p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers 1698not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h 1699was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc 1700configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p> 1701 1702<p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig 1703build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily 1704the absolute latest build environment.)</p> 1705 1706<p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid(). 1707xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd 1708and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command, 1709get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and 1710xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into 1711bzcat.c.</p> 1712 1713<p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the 1714help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output. 1715The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about 1716#including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The 1717<a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading 1718of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for 1719good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion 1720at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p> 1721 1722<a name="18-11-2013" /><a href="#18-11-2013"><hr><h2><b>November 18, 2013</b></h2></a> 1723<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." - 1724The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1725 1726<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.7.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.7</a> is based on 1727<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p> 1728 1729<p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted 1730reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from 1731pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some 1732cleanup.</p> 1733 1734<p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going 1735into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted 1736dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and 1737an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p> 1738 1739<p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer 1740added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem. 1741William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input 1742(the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug 1743where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault). 1744I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using 1745the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a 1746synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with 1747$CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted 1748a typo in the web page.</p> 1749 1750<p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from 1751bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by 1752--longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal 1753querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a 1754debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply). 1755The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and 1756micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite 1757now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p> 1758 1759<a name="17-09-2013" /><a href="#17-09-2013"><hr><h2><b>September 17, 2013</b></h2></a> 1760<blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number." 1761Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway 1762station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function, 1763and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 1764</blockquote> 1765 1766<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on 1767<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p> 1768 1769<p>This release adds 1770several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han 1771submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and 1772a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted 1773acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p> 1774 1775<p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker). 1776The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah" 1777instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in. 1778Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain 1779other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who 1780heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID 1781namespace support.</p> 1782 1783<h3>Pending</h3> 1784 1785<p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should 1786probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd, 1787dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from 1788Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet), 1789syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar, 1790test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E. 1791M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p> 1792 1793<p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't 1794ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig 1795and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up 1796logger and syslogd...</p> 1797 1798<p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory, 1799but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du, 1800expand, and touch.</p> 1801 1802<h3>Infrastructure</h3> 1803 1804<p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the 1805multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes, 1806OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a 1807command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If 1808you're curious, you can do:</p> 1809 1810<blockquote><pre> 1811make defconfig 1812make 1813mkdir singles 1814for i in $(./toybox) 1815do 1816 echo $i 1817 PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break 1818done 1819</pre> 1820<p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p> 1821</blockquote> 1822 1823<p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this 1824time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p> 1825 1826<p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions 1827not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains 1828functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit). 1829This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p> 1830 1831<p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude 1832logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts 1833should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ; 1834option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E. 1835--color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p> 1836 1837<p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf 1838does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it 1839for us".</p> 1840 1841<p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid(). 1842It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite 1843so much anymore.</p> 1844 1845<p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly 1846linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are 1847using it now.</p> 1848 1849<p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag 1850(-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables) 1851that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept 1852into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler, 1853"-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p> 1854 1855<h3>Bugfixes</h3> 1856 1857<p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to 1858finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f 1859someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once). 1860Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p> 1861 1862<p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that 1863python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks 1864for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer 1865then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p> 1866 1867<p>Ashwini Sharma 1868pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some 1869configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p> 1870 1871<p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and 1872a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p> 1873 1874<p>The new function xexec_optargs() 1875replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs 1876during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p> 1877 1878<p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which 1879didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup 1880between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh 1881command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p> 1882 1883<p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't 1884delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm 1885should now be fixed.</p> 1886 1887<p> 1888<a name="26-07-2013" /><a href="#26-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 26, 2013</b></h2></a> 1889<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git 1890mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the 1891mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches 1892against it and post them to the list.</p> 1893 1894<a name="02-07-2013" /><a href="#02-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 2, 2013</b></h2></a> 1895<blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You 1896should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people 1897like you." - 1898The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1899 1900<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on 1901<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds 1902uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by 1903default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and 1904enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups". 1905Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv". 1906</p> 1907 1908<p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and 1909each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help" 1910and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p> 1911 1912<p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client, 1913logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup. 1914Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up. 1915(It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p> 1916 1917<p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach 1918more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The 1919<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis 1920of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p> 1921 1922<p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected, 1923condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught 1924-l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices. 1925Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking), 1926and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no 1927corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work). 1928Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham 1929fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output 1930field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means 1931to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda 1932moved file permission display code to lib so ls and 1933stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the 1934last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it 1935(ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user). 1936</p> 1937 1938<p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global 1939variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc 1940debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and 1941that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of 1942just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking 1943against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes 1944for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes 1945various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical 1946(breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names). 1947 1948<p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build 1949system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The 1950release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control. 1951Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p> 1952</p> 1953 1954<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 1955BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first 1956paragraph now says:</p> 1957 1958<blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this 1959software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote> 1960 1961<p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this 1962permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all 1963copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects 1964that 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 1965both 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 1966less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate 1967the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p> 1968 1969<p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more 1970or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it 1971BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p> 1972 1973<a name="21-03-2013" /><a href="#21-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 21, 2013</b></h2></a> 1974<p>Video of my ELC talk 1975"<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>" 1976is up on youtube. Related materials include the 1977<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an 1978<a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p> 1979 1980<p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about 1981the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p> 1982 1983<ul> 1984<li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li> 1985 <ul> 1986 <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li> 1987 <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li> 1988 </ul> 1989<li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li> 1990 <ul> 1991 <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li> 1992 </ul> 1993<li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li> 1994<li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li> 1995<li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li> 1996 <ul> 1997 <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li> 1998 <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li> 1999 <ul> 2000 <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li>
2001 <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li> 2002 </ul> 2003 </ul> 2004</ul> 2005</span> 2006 2007 2008<a name="14-03-2013" /><a href="#14-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 14, 2013</b></h2></a> 2009<blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." - 2010The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2011 2012<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on 2013<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding 2014the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p> 2015 2016<p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes 2017getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds. 2018"id -Gn root" should now print root's groups 2019instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under 2020Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you 2021can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p> 2022 2023<p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending". 2024Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig. 2025Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig 2026should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p> 2027 2028<p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries 2029(klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p> 2030 2031<a name="18-01-2013" /><a href="#18-01-2013"><hr><h2><b>January 18, 2013</b></h2></a> 2032<blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2033 2034<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on 2035<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There 2036are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the 2037<a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p> 2038 2039<p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s 2040and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to 2041kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite. 2042Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p> 2043 2044<p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and 2045readlink commands. The segfault in ls 2046happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the 2047default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an 2048extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing 2049a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath() 2050code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test 2051suite checks for it).</p> 2052 2053<p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the 2054error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's 2055still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error 2056bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That 2057means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right 2058error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.) 2059Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG 2060doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with 2061at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic 2062(and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma). 2063dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree 2064functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using 2065libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means 2066it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p> 2067 2068<p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that 2069disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back 2070to -Os by default now.</p> 2071 2072<a name="15-12-2012" /><a href="#15-12-2012"><hr><h2><b>December 15, 2012</b></h2></a> 2073<blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a 2074thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly 2075go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." 2076</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2077 2078<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on 2079<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is 2080just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal 2081Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's 2082a new stable version.</p> 2083 2084<p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch 2085(from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a 2086bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8 2087support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option. 2088Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof. 2089The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports 2090-fenq.</p> 2091 2092<p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library, 2093and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel 2094features we depend on start to drop out).</p> 2095 2096<p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per 2097level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more 2098than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out, 2099or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an 2100earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README, 2101the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory 2102(so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p> 2103 2104<p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist(). 2105Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with 2106full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to 2107stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing 2108it).</p> 2109 2110<p>The open group broke their website so the 2111<a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008 2112now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with 2113pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while 2114I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p> 2115 2116<p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant 2117because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current 2118implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option 2119to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks, 2120but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024 2121filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p> 2122 2123<a name="13-11-2012" /><a href="#13-11-2012"><hr><h2><b>November 13, 2012</b></h2></a> 2124<blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins." 2125- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2126 2127<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on 2128<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p> 2129 2130<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and 2131Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and 2132md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix, 2133unix2dos).</p> 2134 2135<p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by 2136default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name. 2137Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p> 2138 2139<p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into 2140"posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008, 2141the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig 2142and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on). 2143An android directory is planned (see the updated 2144<a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p> 2145 2146<p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's 2147global block are now automatically generated, commands should 2148#define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that 2149command.</p> 2150 2151<p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and - 2152in them, such as switch_root.</p> 2153 2154<p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of 2155uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers. 2156The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite 2157properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's 2158fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage 2159calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp 2160and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces 2161break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite 2162properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's 2163fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib 2164fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary 2165on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending 2166on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in 2167a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking 2168partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts: 2169this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it 2170wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite 2171some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to 2172successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc 2173versions was added to portability.h.</p> 2174 2175<p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a 2176rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All 2177the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards 2178document, where applicable.</p> 2179 2180<p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into 2181a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p> 2182 2183<p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're 2184back now.</p> 2185</span> 2186 2187<a name="23-07-2012" /><a href="#23-07-2012"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2012</b></h2></a> 2188<blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys 2189out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked 2190out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2191 2192<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on 2193<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p> 2194 2195<p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from 2196the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p> 2197 2198<p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed 2199taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han 2200contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a 2201case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p> 2202 2203<p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the 2204<a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and 2205<a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option 2206to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime), 2207fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the 2208corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding 2209glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing 2210pending output on exit.</p> 2211 2212<a name="25-06-2012" /><a href="#25-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 25, 2012</b></h2></a> 2213<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> 2214 2215<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit 2216<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's 2217mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than 2218x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which 2219now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test 2220suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the 2221musl libc.</p> 2222 2223<p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here 2224it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40 2225pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p> 2226</span> 2227 2228<a name="12-06-2012" /><a href="#12-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 12, 2012</b></h2></a> 2229<blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that 2230he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the 2231wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was 2232muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had 2233always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely 2234the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2235 2236<p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>, 2237so here it is, based 2238on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the 2239statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should 2240actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting 2241that).</p> 2242 2243<p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development 2244doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course. 2245The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which 2246threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit 2247more frequent from here on.</p> 2248 2249<p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory 2250tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that 2251which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p> 2252 2253<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown, 2254chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if 2255you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug 2256on slackware.</p> 2257 2258<p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and 2259mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint, 2260vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups. 2261Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p> 2262 2263<p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell 2264wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove 2265deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and 2266musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got 2267some cleanups and bugfixes.</p> 2268 2269<p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not 2270to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's 2271problematic).</p> 2272 2273<p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now, 2274yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the 2275SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox 2276multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer 2277segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full 2278posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next 2279release.)</p> 2280 2281<p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros 2282for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue 2283is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p> 2284 2285<p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built 2286Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that 2287'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing. 2288(The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted 2289yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before 22901.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p> 2291 2292 2293<a name="03-03-2012" /><a href="#03-03-2012"><hr><h2><b>March 3, 2012</b></h2></a> 2294 2295<blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral 2296without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them. 2297Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking 2298for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p> 2299</p></blockquote> 2300 2301<p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based 2302on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>. This 2303time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt 2304binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p> 2305 2306<p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I 2307have not quite been keeping up.)</p> 2308 2309<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod, 2310insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename. Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln, 2311realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall. Daniel 2312Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests 2313for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp. 2314Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed 2315cross compiling to work more reliably.</p> 2316 2317<p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's 2318code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new 2319code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python 2320bloat-o-meter.)</p> 2321 2322<p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from 2323Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott, 2324more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano 2325Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and 2326optimizations.</p> 2327 2328<p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link, 2329dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months 2330and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p> 2331 2332 2333<a name="12-02-2012" /><a href="#12-02-2012"><hr><h2><b>February 12, 2012</b></h2></a> 2334<blockquote><p> 2335"for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at 2336least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two 2337important respects..."</p> 2338<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 2339 2340<p>Here's the first BSD licensed release, 2341<a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization 2342point than anything particularly useful. 47 commands in a reasonably 2343ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially 2344finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several 2345patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p> 2346 2347<p>More to come...</p> 2348 2349<hr> 2350<a name="15-11-2011" /><a href="#15-11-2011"><hr><h2><b>November 15, 2011</b></h2></a> 2351- Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2 2352clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line 2353implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p> 2354 2355<p>More to come...</p> 2356 2357<hr> 2358 2359<p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p> 2360 2361<!--#include file="footer.html" --> 2362