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="21-05-2019" /><a href="#21-05-2019"><hr><h2><b>May 21, 2019</b></h2></a> 12<blockquote> 13<p>"I like the cover," he said. "'Don't Panic.' It's the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day."</p> <p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 14</blockquote> 15 16<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.1</a> 17(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.1>git commit</a>) 18is out.</p> 19 20<p>Android is now using toybox as part of a <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2018-November/009824.html>"hermetic" build</a> 21(meaning Android is building under toybox, which is halfway to Android 22building under Android). See Android's <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/prebuilts/build-tools/+log>build-tools</a> and <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/soong/+log>soong</a> repositories to follow along with development, or check the list for the <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2019-May/010485.html>current status</a>.</p> 23 24<p><u>New commands</u>: Isaac Dunham added <b>mcookie</b>, which is used by 25X11. Elliott Hughes added <b>devmem</b>, which replaces toolbox's "r".</p> 26 27<p><u>Promoted</u>: <b>tar</b>, <b>gunzip</b>, and <b>zcat</b> were cleaned 28up and moved out of pending. 29Tar is a near-rewrite with support for --owner --group and --sparse, 30capable of autodetecting "wget blah.tar.bz2 -O - | tar xv", a --restrict option 31that only allows files to extract into a single subdirectory, and so on.</p> 32 33<p><u>Added to pending</u>: 34Jarno Mäkipää contributed a new <b>vi</b> implementation. Makepost added 35<b>man</b>.</p> 36 37<p><u>Updates</u>: Elliott added <b>find</b> -wholename/-iwholename, -printf, 38and -context, <b>grep</b> --exclude-dir, and <b>echo</b> -E. 39Rob added <b>blkid</b> -U and -L, <b>mount</b> now has UUID= support via blkid -U, 40you can now specify TZ="blah" in the <b>date</b> -d input string (although 41why the double quotes are required is an open question), and <b>sed</b> now 42understands ,+N relative ranges. Makepost added <b>rm</b> -v. 43The human_readable fields in <b>ps</b>/<b>top</b>/<b>iotop</b> now use all 44available space to show more precision, <b>iotop</b> displays swap bandwidth 45properly (it was showing a signed field as unsigned), and 46<b>touch</b> -t and -d autodetect the time format.</p> 47 48<p><u>Cleanups</u>: In pending Rob did some bc cleanup, 49Colin Davidson did some arp cleanup, 50Uros Prestor fixed route argument parsing, and 51in bc Daniel Rosenberg fixed bc_vec_concat()'s allocation and 52Gavin Howard fixed an overflow bug in bc_num_ulong().</p> 53 54<p>Elliott made scan_key() detect cursor keys and such with several more 55terminal types, made more better about directories and non-tty output, 56cleaned up inconsistent uses of ARRAY_LEN(), taught file 57to recognize a c-sky ELF machine, and fixed timezone and daylight 58savings time issues in date and its tests. 59Rob simplified netcat and ping using new lib/net.c infrastructure. 60When run as non-PID 1 (for a chroot) oneit's exit code now indicates 61which signal it's exiting due to. 62Hadrian Węgrzynowski #defined constants for mkpathat. 63Date now uses the current time for unspecified fields (instead of zeroing 64them), and should set the weekday properly. 65Sort's -k2.3,4.5 syntax is now documented and behaves more closely to 66other implementations (silly as that behavior is). 67Significant speedup to sed s/a/b/g on a megabyte long line (it was 68O(n^2) and now it's quite snappy).</p> 69 70<p>Several cases of warning about stdout failing to write were silenced 71because things like piping the output to head means stdout is a special 72case: its output is often discarded and that's fine. And xprintf() 73and friends only checks stdout for errors so it can exit early ("yes | head" 74should not spin endlessly) without actually flushing anything. 75There's an ongoing design debate about line buffering stdin and stdout 76that'll have to be resolved next dev cycle.</p> 77 78<p><u>Bugs</u>: 79Elliott sent in a lot of fixes for building AOSP with toybox: 80support for more date formats, sed substitution of empty capture groups 81and an endless loop with -EPIPE, fixed find -path/-ipath, made loggit() 82only feed LOG_AUTH to syslog when we have a tty, gave grep a bunch 83of --longname synonyms for short options, added getfattr --only-values, 84and timeout --foreground --preserve-status and --signal.</p> 85 86<p>Top got a lot of tweaks: it no longer collates thread's CPU usage into the 87parent thread (in -H mode), hides the cursor in interactive mode, updates the 88display properly in batch mode, and accepts ENTER 89as a synonym for SPACE when refreshing the display. The header lines 90now abbreviate long numbers with units (via human_readable()), 91more reliably spans the terminal width, and says "Thread" instead 92of "Task" when it's showing threads. The task/thread count now adds up 93(understanding more kernel states and treating unknown ones as "sleeping"). 94Top now treats -o "" as an error (previously it displayed an empty screen).</p> 95 96<p>William Djupström pointed out login needs to chown() the tty, and made it 97clear the environment when -p is absent. 98Vidar Holen fixed inverted find -exec exit status. 99Rob made chgrp() stop relying on libc's printf("%s", NULL) printing "(null)" 100because a <a href=https://github.com/varnishcache/varnish-cache/issues/2879>newly added gcc bug</a> turns that into a build break, and 101fixed an outright embarassing xstrndup() bug. 102Liwugang fixed a segfault when stat's format string had a trailing %. 103A missing else in grep meant -x was sometimes ignored.</p> 104 105<p><u>Infrastructure</u>: 106in the build scripts/portability.sh now tests that the compiler it's trying 107to use exists up front. We no longer link against librt because on glibc that's 108pulling in libpthread for some unknown reason.</p> 109 110<p>TOYFLAG_ARGFAIL() lets commands return custom exit values when option parsing 111fails (because AOSP build scripts cared), so timeout --unknown returns 125 112and so on: chroot, diff, cmp, env, grep, nohup, and sort also use it now with 113various values.</p> 114 115<p>New FLAG() macros: FLAG(x) expands to (toys.optflags&FLAG_x) and returns 116zero if the command line argument's bit isn't set and nonzero if it is 117(meaning -x was or wasn't encountered on the command line this time by 118lib/args.c). Lots of commands got converted to use them.</p> 119 120<p>New lib/env.c with reset_env(), xsetenv(), and xunsetenv() which frees 121the old environment variable when it wasn't inherited from exec(). This 122lets long-running loops reset environment variables without memory leaks.</p> 123 124<p>New xnotify() plumbing in lib/portability.c with Linux and BSD versions 125(which should also work on MacOS X).</p> 126 127<p>New xparsedate() and xvali_date() functions allow date, tar --mtime, and 128touch to understand the same date formats, 129xpopen_both() now knows how to use existing filehandles for the child's 130stdin/stdout, and no longer redirects stderr (which hides errors), 131new nanomove(), nanodiff(), union socksaddr, xrecvwait(), 132and human_readable_long() to show more than 3 digits of output.</p> 133 134<p>Taught xgetaddrinfo() to return a wildcard address for a NULL host, 135xconnbind() sets SO_REUSEADDR by default, 136fileunderdir() returns the abspath to the file now (since we had to work 137it out anyway), and 138xabspath() uses O_PATH now (because Android's SELinux rules got more aggressive).</p> 139 140<p>Several new xsendfile() variants, including sendfile_len() to copy 141a specific amount of data and xsendfile_pad() to append zeroes to the 142output when there isn't enough input.</p> 143 144<p>regexec0() is now using libc's REG_STARTEND supported by every libc out 145there _except_ musl. (It originated in BSD and was adopted by glibc, bionic, 146and uClibc 15 years ago, and is also supported in macosx. Musl's maintainer 147<a href=https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2013/01/15/26>turned down</a> 148the feature request as an invalid use case he didn't think they should 149be trying to do.)</p> 150 151<p><u>Docs</u>: 152the <a href=license.html>license page</a> now has an SPDX identifier, and links to more 153history/context. The actual LICENSE file had its title line removed 154so <a href=https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/pull/643#issuecomment-463746027>github could recognize it</a> as 0BSD. (We're still waiting for 155"<a href=https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/pull/643#issuecomment-464380789>a while</a>" to pass before github actually does, though.)</p> 156 157<p>A new www/doc/mount.txt file describes how mount works under the covers.</p> 158 159<p.Rob consistently misspelled "canonical" and "millisecond", mountpoint 160has a synopsis now, 161Kevin van der Kamp fixed a typo in netstat's help text, and Elliott 162Hughes fixed typos everywhere and made the tense, capitalization, and 163punctuation of help text more consistent.</p> 164 165<p>New paragraph in the code style part of design.html explaining that 166"char* a, b;" is not how C works, and since you wind up with "char *a, b;" 167anyway you might as well say that.</p> 168 169<p>Given dreamhost's tendency to repeatedly delete the mailing list 170archive, the nav bar on the left links to a backup web archive now too.</p> 171 172<p>The FAQ now says why we do time based releases.</p> 173 174<p><u>Testing</u>: Added VERBOSE=nopass to not show passing tests. 175The test suite now does an rm -rf on testdir between each command so 176debris files don't accumulate. 177New skipnot function skips the next test if a command line fails, and 178toyonly function only runs command when we're testing the toybox version 179of command. (This isn't the same as TEST_HOST, the host version could be 180toybox.) 181The find -newer test calls "sleep .1" to avoid intermittently failing with an 182identical timestamp. 183Elliott added the start of a file.test rogues gallery. 184No longer call lsattr in "make tests" because the behavior differs by 185filesystem and it needs fixing somehow.</p> 186 187<a name="08-02-2019" /><a href="#08-02-2019"><hr><h2><b>February 8, 2019</b></h2></a> 188<blockquote> 189<p>"Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified 190Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and 191in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have 192been left blank to save on printing costs."</p> 193<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 194</blockquote> 195 196<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.0</a> 197(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.0>git commit</a>) 198is out.</p> 199 200<p>Toybox now builds on MacOS and FreeBSD, thanks to the efforts of Elliott 201Hughes and Ed Maste respectively. Use the "make macos_defconfig" and "make 202freebsd_defconfig" targets to enable the set of commands that compile on 203each so far.</p> 204 205<p><u>New commands</u>: Added an <b>sntp</b> client/server (RFC 4330 Simple Network Time 206Protocol, a compatible subset of ntp). The <b>test</b> command was rewritten 207and promoted out of pending.</p> 208 209<p><u>New options</u>: <b>grep</b> now has --color, supports embedded NUL bytes in its input, 210recognizes binary files, and passes all of grep.test (in case you 211needed the middle numerical field of -bB, etc). 212Josh Gao added ipv6 and UDP support to <b>netcat</b>. 213Volodymyr Medvid reported that install -d doesn't honor -o or -g. 214Elliott Hughes did a lot of work to support hermetic Android/AOSP builds: 215<b>mkdir</b> accepts both --parent and --parents as synonyms for -p, <b>touch</b> ignores -f, 216<b>basename</b> added -s to remove a trailing suffix, <b>dirname</b> now supports multiple 217arguments, <b>cmp</b> accepts --quiet and --silent as synonyms for -s, <b>hostname</b> 218added -sfd, <b>head</b> added --bytes as a synonym for -c and --lines as a synonym 219for -n, <b>mktemp</b> added -t and fixed -u, <b>sed</b> added -z and -iEXT to keep backup files, 220<b>md5sum</b> and sha1sum added --status and --check as synonyms -s and -c, 221<b>readlink</b> added --canonicalize as a synonym for -f, <b>sort</b> grew -V, 222<b>patch</b> added -s its synonym --quiet, <b>stat</b> added --format as 223a synonym for -c, <b>xargs</b> added -p -t -r, 224Eduardas Meile asked 225that <b>umount</b> ignore -c. Reverend Homer added a small optimization to file.c, 226and Elliott taught <b>file</b> to recognize riscv ELF binaries. Peter Collingbourne 227taught <b>ls</b> -t to use the nanoseconds field. 228<b>patch</b> has better support for patching a file with a tab in the name.</p> 229 230<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 231<b>cp</b> --preserve was segfaulting when you didn't specify _what_ to 232preserve (it now correctly defaults to "mot") and didn't get the permissions 233right when copying a symlink's contents as a regular file, 234<b>sort</b> -x didn't work when 235attached to a key, <b>host</b> didn't allocate a big enough buffer for worst 236case ipv6 address size, <b>sed</b> needed a ; between b and } when other 237implementations don't (we're already well past what posix says but a script 238out in the field broke...), 239and several fixes to <b>hostname</b> in a container, <b>ps</b>/<b>top</b> were 240misreading the VIRT and SHM fields.</p> 241 242<p><u>Pending</u>: Gavin Howard updated <b>bc</b> and added more tests, 243Marius Adaskevicius pointed out <b>mdev</b> -s should follow symlinks, 244Yangchun Fu reported a <b>dhcp</b> checksum bug, <b>modprobe</b> needed errno reset 245to avoid reporting spurious errors in verbose mode and no longer 246exits with status 1 if it can't find /etc/modprobe.conf, the <b>more</b> command 247wasn't always flushing stdout when it exited.</p> 248 249<p><u>Build</u>: 250<b>chrt</b> no longer #warns about the musl sched_get_priority_min() bug, but 251instead works around it. 252We were mixing setjmp/siglongjmp (harmless in some contexts but it kind 253of annoyed FreeBSD), and 254make install_airlock now adds sha256sum (because the Linux 4.20 build now 255needs that for the s390x target).</p> 256 257<p><u>Coding style</u>: 258Rob converted the rest of the option GLOBALS() to the new single letter 259coding style, and the new FLAG(x) macro is a slightly tidier way to say 260"toys.optflags&FLAG_x". 261Removed CFG_SORT_BIG (the sort command always 262has the full functionality now. The general future direction or toybox 263is to either have a command or not have it; multiple versions of the 264same command aren't worth the complexity in testing, documentation, 265or system adminstration).</p> 266 267<p><u>Library code</u>: 268The mkflags plumbing can now support arbitrary punctuation as option 269names via an escape syntax (because mkfs.vfat specifies an offset with -@), 270and lib/args.c now only sets FLAGS_NODASH when the first argument 271didn't have a dash (allowing "ps ax" and "ps -ax" to behave differently).</p> 272 273<p>Added an xrename() function, 274xchdir() has better error reporting, xconnect()/xbind() had their 275implementations merged, xsendto() moved from ping to lib, xpoll() now 276measures elapsed time and only waits for the remaining period when restarted, 277and Eduardas Meile converted several error_exit() to error_exit_raw() (because 278yocto 2.6 buils with -Werror=format-security by default).</p> 279 280<p>There's a scripts/portability.sh now which lets the build use gsed and gmake 281(when available) in more places to avoid broken host versions on MacOS and FreeBSD. 282The syntax of the "noreturn" attribute 283changed slightly, some calls to strnstr() were replaced with strcasestr(), 284we work around MacOS' lack of features.h, portability.h can now do Apple's 285endianness macros, and so on.</p> 286 287<p>Following the <a href=faq.html#support_horizon>seven year rule</a> 288Elliott removed support or glibc 2.10, and also 289reformatted a lot of --help text for consistency (removing trailing 290periods and such).</p> 291 292<p><u>Test suite</u>: 293The test suite now has its own version of "pending", specifically "make tests" 294skips test files without the executable bit set (unless you export $TEST_ALL). 295This eliminates "expected failures" (I.E. files with unresolved todo items) 296from the global regression test. Additional tests can be added to the global 297regression test with chmod +x as the todo items they document get resolved.</p> 298 299<p>Several places the test suite got fluffed out, including guards to skip 300root-only tests when run as a normal user. The testcmd function prints the 301short name instead of the full path to the command. 302The tests for the test command 303("test.test") no longer test the shell builtin but correctly test the 304toybox command. (Now say that ten times fast.)</p> 305 306<p>Bash version skew required replacing "continue" with "return" to stop 307tests early in bash 4.4 (for VERBOSE=fail).</p> 308 309 310<a name="31-10-2018" /><a href="#31-10-2018"><hr><h2><b>October 31, 2018</b></h2></a> 311<blockquote><p> 312"In the beginning the Universe was created. 313This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 314</p> 315</blockquote> 316 317<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.8.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.8</a> 318(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.8>git commit</a>) 319is out (a month late).</p> 320 321<p>Toybox <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2018-October/009769.html>now builds</a> with the Android NDK (r18 release), almost out of the box. 322You have to add an "llvm-cc" symlink to "clang", then use CROSS_COMPILE=llvm- 323with the appropriate $PATH (or absolute path in CROSS_COMPILE) for the 324target you want to build for. (To run it on a non-android host, you probably 325want "LDFLAGS=--static" too.)</p> 326 327<p><u>New commands</u>: <b>i2cdetect</b>, <b>i2cdump</b>, <b>i2cget</b>, and <b>i2cset</b> 328courtesy of Elliott/Android. The <b>watch</b> command got a complete (tty-aware) 329rewrite, and was promoted out of pending. The <b>prlimit</b> command is back 330(a configuration bug was always disabling it), and <b>ascii</b> now defaults y 331in defconfig (an oversight).</p> 332 333<p><u>New options</u>: 334The <b>ifconfig</b> command added -S (short view) giving one line of 335information per interface, in "name ipv4/mask macaddr [ipv6/mask@type...]" 336format. <b>grep</b> grew binary file detection, with -I and -a options to 337ignore them or force treating them as ascii (really utf8). 338Zach Van Rijn asked for <b>find -empty</b>. 339In the <b>file</b> command, Elliott improved java 340.class support and added .wav, .bmp, and android .dex. 341Elliott also added "getconf -a" and a lot of missing getconf symbols the 342AOSP build uses, including support for pathconf(3) symbols requiring two 343arguments. This means getconf's arguments work more like ubuntu's 344now (one or two arguments, not iterating through the supplied list and 345processing each like last release), and -l grew section identifiers (so 346the "getconf -l" output is no longer a directly consumable list of symbols 347it takes). 348Command line options specifying durations (like top -d or ping -i) can 349now use fractions and units, like "1.5" and ".1m". See "toybox --help" for 350details. 351Toybox now dereferences one layer of symlinks if it doesn't recognize the 352name it's called under (so if you "ln -s $(which sleep) blah" and then 353"./blah 30", it should figure out you mean sleep 30).</p> 354 355<p><u>Pending</u>: 356Gavin Howard contributed a large new <b>bc</b> implementation to pending, 357which covers everything the kernel build needs (and more) but is going to 358take a while to review. 359In <b>diff</b> the android guys added --color and timestamps on the 360+++/--- lines. In <b>mdev</b> Faustas Azuolas Bagdonas added support 361for mdev.conf's fourth field. Reverend Homer suggested an error message 362improvement in <b>wget</b>, Kevin Spiteri did a cleanup pass on test.c, 363and there was a cleanup pass on the passwd command.</p> 364 365<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 366Elliott responded to a bug in <b>getconf</b>'s sed-based header generation by 367replacing it with a more conventional array of #defined symbols, with #ifdefs 368for missing symbols on the three libc implementations (glibc, bionic, musl) 369we've tested so far. (This requires portability.h work to add new supported 370build environments, but at least it works on bionic now.) 371The <b>file</b> command now fails gracefully when reading pathologically 372broken ELF files (the tests for integer overflow missed one), and 373<b>date</b> no longer shows a meaningless errno when it can't parse the 374date format. 375Several fixes in <b>ping</b> (-w and -W didn't work, -c kept sending packets 376while waiting for replies, and when no reply packets were received the summary 377data was printed twice). 378Elliott fixed <b>wc</b> column widths (traditional reality doesn't match 379posix), fixed <b>modprobe</b>'s error handling (reported by Wen Xie), and 380also fixed the units on blockdev --blkraget (reported by Martijn Coenen). 381Several small fixes to the <b>stat</b> command's output (help text, quoting 382style, leading zeroes, switch -f from %t to %T), <b>oneit</b> no longer 383reboots the system when it's not called as PID 1. 384Last release's commit letting $STRIP be redefined had a typo. 385Nick Kralevich added an istty() check before calling TIOCGWINSZ (which 386triggered Android's strict ioctl filtering on non-filesystem fifos). 387An unstripped build (where the "strip" command fails for a given 388CROSS_COMPILE) will now overwrite the (read-only) output file instead of 389failing a rebuild. The dirtree plumbing no longer prints a "No" on front 390of the filename in error messages (such as "permission denied").</p> 391 392<p><u>Docmentation</u> 393Elliott updated the roadmap with Android AOSP status, towards turning that 394into a hermetic build (hopefully with an eventual self-hosting option, work 395is <a href=b33d37d6f735>already underway</a> on the airlock step). 396Rob added a little more context for LSB and described the move from Aboriginal 397Linux to mkroot. 398The <b>ps</b> help text changed: now "ps -o help" shows the fields and the normal 399--help is much more manageable. Ifconfig's --help text also got tidied up. 400Our LICENSE file has the SPDX identifier (0BSD) now, and the note about 401the kconfig/ subdirectory still having (build only, non-shipping) GPL code 402in it moved into the kconfig subdirectory.</p> 403 404<p><u>Coding style change:</u> 405GLOBALS() now uses the argument letter as the variable 406name for variables automatically set by command line arguments via lib/args.c, 407and no longer requires they be one per line. 408Removed use of the gcc 409\e extension in string constants, replacing it with \033.</p> 410 411<p><u>Library code:</u> 412lib/interestingtimes.c was renamed to lib/tty.c. 413The deflate code from toys/pending/compress.c moved to lib/deflate.c, 414which gunzip.c now uses when it's not configured to use zlib. (This reduces 415the bootstrap dependencies for the "airlock" step of a hermetic build.) 416The compression side remains a todo item. 417Added "%" to lib/args.c reading seconds (including fractions/units) into a 418long milliseconds argument. Redid xparsetime() to not need floating point, 419added xparsemillitime() for milliseconds common case, and 420parsetime() now treats leading garbage as an error instead of returning zero. 421The bufgetpwuid()/pufgetgrgid() functons can now handle more than 4k of group 422data. The set_terminal() function can now set serial speed, and microcom.c 423uses it. Added xsignal_flags(), and more consistently use xsignal() (which wraps 424sigaction()) instead of signal(). 425A new xgetrandom() function calls the new getrandom() system call, falling 426back to /dev/urandom on older kernel/libc (made to actually _work_ by 427Patrick Oppenlander).</p> 428 429<p><u>Build infrastructure:</u> 430Updated dependency detection so "make distclean defconfig toybox" now works 431all on the same command line. (This is nice when $CROSS_COMPILE changes). 432scripts/config2help.c no longer includes parts of lib/ and just copies what 433it needs into itself, improving build portability. 434The build now checks the specified cross compiler exists, hopefully providing 435a more informative error message when it doesn't. Similarly, when .config is 436missing the error message suggests running make defconfig.</p> 437 438<a name="23-06-2018" /><a href="#23-06-2018"><hr><h2><b>June 23, 2018</b></h2></a> 439<blockquote> 440<p>There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what 441the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be 442replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another 443theory which states that this has already happened.</p> 444<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 445</blockquote> 446 447<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.7.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.7</a> 448(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.7>git commit</a>) 449is out.</p> 450 451<p><u>New commands</u>: Rob Landley added <b>getconf</b>, Elliott Hughes added 452<b>uuidgen</b>, and <b>ping</b> and <b>fmt</b> were promoted out of pending.</p> 453 454<p><u>New options</u>: The <b>cp</b> command added the --parents option, 455<b>readlink</b> now has -m to show where a missing path would be, 456<b>netstat</b> got some updates (better nommu support, it can use /etc/services 457names, more command line options are bounds checked), 458Ng Zhi An added --getra and --setra (get/set readahead) to <b>blockdev</b>, 459Elliott Hughes added <b>xxd</b> -o and made <b>top</b> -d understand fractional 460sections (because the Linux Test Project uses that), and 461Minghui Liu added <b>watch</b> -b.</p> 462 463<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: Several fixes to <b>vmstat</b>: Elliott Hughes made it work on a 46448-core machine 465and fixed a glitch with -n, Haroon Maqsood pointed out "vmstat 1 1" didn't 466stop and "vmstat -n" didn't print the first theader line. 467Minghui Liu fixed a bug where <b>cp</b> -p didn't preserve 468timestamps, and pointed out the b, c, and d suffixes on numbers weren't 469working. Ryan Pritchard pointed out that <b>du</b> -d0 should act like du -s. 470Filip Perich made an RFC2347 OACK compliance fix to <b>tftp</b> in pending. 471Zach van Rijn fixed a bug in <b>xxd</b> causing incorrect translation of 472uppercase characters. 473Elliott fixed several things in <b>top</b> (removed spurious '\r' characters from -b 474output, removed interactive flicker, made running processes bold), and 475pushed Rob to make <b>file</b> work better recognizing things on stdin 476("cat /bin/ls | file -" still won't work but "file - < /bin/ls" should). 477Rob fixed a bug in <b>netstat</b> on 64 bit big endian systems, 478and fixed <b>cut</b> -DF 479(a posix compliance fix broke its ability to act as a decent awk replacment 480because outputting all delimiterless lines isn't what you want there, -D 481now disables that too).</p> 482</u></p> 483 484<p><u>Documentation</u>: Rob added a buildroot section to the roadmap with the 485prequisites that needs to run, and reformatted more of the ps --help text 486to two columns.</p> 487 488<p><u>Library</u>: 489FLAGS_NODASH is now set in toys.optargs when an optstring starting 490with & has no dash in its first argument. (This lets "ps -ax" and "ps ax" 491behave differently.) Factored out xtestfile() into lib/. 492The comma-separated-list parsing infrastructure moved to lib/commas.c. 493Added mkpath() for the common case of mkpathat() and #defined MKPATHAT_* 494constants for the uncommon cases. Elliott added better error checking 495to xparsetime() and fixed a bug in names_to_pid() (used in <b>pidof</b> 496and <b>killall</b> and such). 497Rob inlined the old toys/e2fs.h into pending's mke2fs, 498and removed a rogue semicolon from the WOULD_EXIT() macro that screwed 499up if() statement levels. The do_lines() semantics changed adding a 500callback(0,0) at the end of each file.</p> 501 502<p><u>Tests</u>: 503The test_* commands under toys/example were all renamed demo_* so 504they don't share a namespace with running a standalone command 505through the test suite (ala "make test_sed"), then 506demo_human_readable became demo_number so it can also test atolx() 507suffixes. The readlink.test was getting confused by a 508behavior difference between toybox and ubuntu (Ubuntu's ln -sf wouldn't 509replace a symlink that pointed to itself, toybox's would), now there's 510an explicit rm so it works on ubuntu too. The test suite plumbing's 511error message for a test with the wrong number of arguments now 512correctly identifies which test it's complaining about, and it can now 513run a test on a command name beginning with "-" (none yet but it 514comes up in toysh).</p> 515 516<p><u>Building</u>: You can now override strip with $STRIP. The set of 517"make install_airlock" commands got tweaked for the 4.17 kernel (which 518needs bison and flex because the new kconfig plumbing doesn't have _shipped 519versions of those generated files like the old kconfig did), and for 520the new release (remove ping, toybox provides it now). 521$LDFLAGS now applies to library probing (the android NDK provides 522dynamic libraries without corresponding --static versions). 523Elliott took a CFG_TOYBOX_DEBUG check out of an error_exit() to make 524clang stop complaining about an error that should never happen.</p> 525 526<a name="24-02-2018" /><a href="#24-02-2018"><hr><h2><b>February 24, 2018</b></h2></a> 527<blockquote><p> 528"Arthur," said Ford.<br /> 529"Hello? Yes?" said Arthur.<br /> 530"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."<br /> 531"Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that."<br /> 532</p> 533<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 534</blockquote> 535 536<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.6.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.6</a> 537(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.6>git commit</a>) 538is out, a month and change late.</p> 539 540<p>This release adds a <b>crc32</b> command and 541cleans up and promotes <b>iconv</b>, <b>logger</b>, and <b>setfattr</b>. 542Pending added <b>stty</b> and <b>fmt</b>, the other half of <b>ping</b>, 543and got a lot of cleanup on <b>gzip</b>/<b>gunzip</b>/<b>zcat</b>.</p> 544 545<p>The <b>cut</b> command got a complete rewrite adding support for multiple 546ranges, utf8/unicode characters, and new -CDFO options. Use -C to measure 547columns rather than characters (for double width chars), and "cut -DF 3-5" 548selects words (like "awk '{print $3 $4 $5}'").</p> 549 550<p>This release adds <b>top -m</b> and <b>iotop -H</b> (and fixed top width truncating for narrow terminal windows), 551added <b>iconv -c</b>, fixed <b>ps -T 1234</b> to show threads belonging to 552that PID, improved <b>file</b>'s executable identification (properly recognizing 553both endiannesses and adding sh/frv fdpic, bpf, and new microblaze 554identifiers), and <b>blkid</b> now only shows LABEL= when it isn't blank.</p> 555 556<p>Running ./configure now does "make defconfig", help_exit() now shows the 557"See %s --help" message on the same line, and several web pages 558(about, code, roadmap, cleanup) got updates.</p> 559 560<p>Elliott and the Android devs added <b>df -i</b>, <b>uptime -p</b>, 561<b>time -v</b>, and <b>xxd -i -ri</b>, 562fixed <b>id -G</b> to only output the group IDs, fixed the <b>xargs -0 -n</b> 563combination, made <b>find -exec +</b> obey ARG_MAX (just like xargs), made 564<b>killall</b> kill scripts too, fixed an off by one error in <b>pidof</b> 565that could cause false positive matches in 15 character names, added 566gzip/gunzip/zcat tests, and taught <b>file</b> to identify more stuff 567(ogg, TrueType font, LLVM bitcode, PEM certs, and PE executables), and 568for some reason needed TOYBOX_VENDOR in the version stuff. 569Android <b>getprop</b>/<b>setprop</b> now allows ro. properties to have 570arbitrary lengths, <b>losetup</b> can now find loop devices under /dev/block (where android puts 571them for historical reasons), and Andreas Gampe pointed out a thinko in 572<b>top</b> that triggered llvm's address sanitizer checks.</p> 573 574<p>Gael PORTAY asked for mdev to work when Linux has the 575block layer configured out, Patrick Oppenlander pointed out a problem 576with make bloatcheck's build dependencies, and 577xuphung on github fixed config2help building on MacOS X.</p> 578 579<p>Commands with locale support now setlocale(LC_TYPE, "C.UTF-8") for more 580targeted locale support (enable character parsing with 581utf8 support, use "C" semantics otherwise). The toys/example/test_*.c 582commands got renamed demo_*.c.</p> 583 584<p>In lib.c the millitime() function returns current unix time in milliseconds 585(which as a 64 bit number is good for + or - 292 million years from 586midnight Jan 1 1970), and the old xgetty() function became tty_fd() returning 587-1 instead of erroring out.</p> 588 589<p>The "make help" text moved from the Makefile to scripts/help.txt, 590ls.c now lists some of its deviations from posix, and work is underway 591to make ps.c more intelligible (and figure out how to break it up into 592multiple files).</p> 593 594<a name="12-10-2017" /><a href="#12-10-2017"><hr><h2><b>October 12, 2017</b></h2></a> 595<blockquote><p>Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went 596mad now?</p> 597<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 598</blockquote> 599 600<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.5.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.5</a> 601(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.5>git commit</a>) 602is out.</p> 603 604<p>This is another <b>mostly bugfix release</b>. I delayed it a bit trying to get some 605of the many half-finished projects (dd, ping, lsof, iconv, cut, sysconf, 606the cp --parents option...) finished/promoted/tested, but decided adding big 607things at the end of the dev cycle would be too destabilizing.</p> 608 609<p>A couple <b>new features</b> slipped in anyway. Ilya Kuzmich added head -c 610and strings -t (and corrected strings' output in a couple places). Elliott 611Hughes taught file to recognize Macintosh (Mach-O) binaries.</p> 612 613<p><b>NOTE</b>: the chrt command is broken when built against musl-libc 614because that project's maintainer decided he didn't like the system calls 615it depends on, so he 616<a href=https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/commit/?id=1e21e78bf7a5>removed 617them from his libc</a>. The prebuilt binaries are built against musl, 618so the chrt command there will always say -ENOSYS. (It works fine built against 619glibc, and presumably bionic or uClibc.)</p> 620 621<p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Remounting (mount -o remount,rw) should work properly now, 622and we fixed another place ps was segfaulting when /proc 623entries vanished out from under us (a hard to hit race condition 624mostly noticeable in long-running "top" exiting; error value was treated 625as a pointer). Elliott Hughes fixed a -Wformat warning in expr.c, 626and made xargs split the command 627line at ARG_MAX (which is 1/4 the stack size ulimit, which normal users 628can arbitrarily increase but execve() will complain if they don't). 629Josh Gao made netcat -l exit after handling a request, and reported a 630seq bug (seq "1000000 10000001" output 1e+06, fixed now). Zach Riggle fixed a 631broken URL in the README. Rob fixed env -0 checking the flag wrong so 632it didn't work in combination with other flags (typo).</p> 633 634<p><b>Plumbing</b>: 635Replaced mbrtowc() with a new utf8towc() that doesn't have a context 636struct or care about locale. A bugfix in comma_scan() (wasn't removing an entry at the end 637of the list) is why remount _sometimes_ worked (depending on argument 638order), xgetaddrinfo() is now separate from xconnect(), 639atolx_range() learned the w (word=2) suffix, and b is now (block=512) instead 640of (byte=1).</p> 641 642<p><b>Build</b>: Patrick Oppenlander added a workaround for a bug in config2help.c 643that resulted in segfaults on newer toolchains. (It was actually a use 644after free error; the build infrastructure isn't nearly as heavily audited as 645code that gets installed on the target; oops.) A new GITHASH 646environment variable can force the build version from 647the command line, and the build checks for .git in the top directory 648before asking git what our version is (so it isn't confused by ../../.git 649in an enclosing directory). Added a build #warning about musl intentionally 650breaking chrt (as with nommu fork() musl now provides a broken 651stub function so compile-time probes for its existence think it's there, and 652you can't run the result to test behavior when cross compiling).</p> 653 654<a name="19-06-2017" /><a href="#19-06-2017"><hr><h2><b>June 19, 2017</b></h2></a> 655<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. 656To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.</p> 657<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 658</blockquote> 659 660<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.4.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.4</a> 661(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.4>git commit</a>) 662is out. No new commands this time, but 663<b>chrt</b> and <b>dmesg</b> got promoted out of pending.</p> 664 665<p><u>New features</u>: 666Rob rewrote paste, which should work much better now, and added grep 667-M and -S to match and skip wildcards respectively (useful with -r). 668Elliott's updated dmesg has -T and --color. The file 669command can recognize gzip now, uptime grew -s, date grew %N, env knows - as a first argument 670means -i (posix!) and grew -0, ls defaults to -b 671instead of -q now when there's a tty, and ls has a new -ll option (with 672--full-time as a compatibility synonym) showing nanoseconds and (for some 673reason) timezone. (Why do individual files have timezones?) Elliott added 674"uudecode -o -" support. Illya Kuzmich taught head -v and -q. The cpio 675code no longer adds the "TRAILER!!!" entry by default (initramfs extractor 676doesn't care) without which you can concatenate cpio archives with "cat". 677(Use the new --trailer option if you want the legacy behavior.) 678In pending, fdisk compiles now and tar understands bzip2.</p> 679 680<p><u>Build</u>: 681The "make install_airlock" target now symlinks bc from the host because 682the kernel <a href=https://landley.net/notes-2013.html#28-03-2013>inexplicably</a> 683needs that to build. This was motivated by 684<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a>, which builds under 685a toybox airlock directory.</p> 686 687<p>Lots of work on the test suite, mostly from the Android guys who are now 688running it under Android. This fixed several existing tests that didn't 689pass, made more tests run on a toybox-only system, and so on. The test suite 690infrastructure now has a second testing function, 691"testcmd", which supplies the command name being tested (bypassing 692shell builtins).</p> 693 694<p>Various android build and config fixes, getting closer to being able 695to let android someday use scripts/make.sh instead of generated/* snapshots. 696Also more work into building under android's NDK; not quite there yet 697but much closer. 698Use nproc in scripts/make.sh detect available processors (so you can control the SMP level with taskset). 699Removed the old uClibc compatibility glue, it's been 5 years since their 700<a href=http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2016-December/180102.html>last release</a>.</p> 701 702<p>The new config option TOYBOX_PEDANTIC_ARGS checks arguments when there 703are no arguments, so things like "uptime" no longer silently ignore arguments 704you pass but instead refuse to run.</p> 705 706<p><u>Docs</u>: 707The FAQ now has more than one entry. Commands no longer output the full 708help text for argument errors but instead just say "See %s --help" with the 709command name (in addition to the actual error message). 710Elliott did a big period-ectomy on all the --help text, and 711we cleaned up some tab/space inconsistency. The 712non-html help -a output now has separators with the command name. 713The top/iotop and pkill/pgrep help text now describe a lot more of what 714the commands can do. Twitter's code of conduct page went down so we 715mirrored the text locally.</p> 716 717<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 718Fixed a race condition in ps/top where a process that exited right as we 719read its data returned a different error value than we were expecting (which 720was causing long-running top instances to occasionally exit), 721mount now gives an error if it can't autodetect the filesystem 722type, ps no longer queries the terminal size when output isn't to a tty 723(so "ps -A | cat" doesn't vary), date's chkmktime() was replaced with 724simple range checks for fields (to avoid false positives from things like 725timezones and daylight savings time), removed %s from date's help (we 726didn't implement it, we have @seconds[.nanoseconds] instead), fixed 727zcat's buffer flush logic (which was always failing on files larger 728than 32k), and factor now detects requests for numbers >64 bits and fails 729loudly instead of producing incorrect answers. 730Elliott fixed touch -a/-m (they were backwards), and allowed ':' in 731setprop's property names. Grep now exits with 2 for errors (so -q can 732distinguish "didn't find" from "didn't work"), doesn't stop on symlinks 733that point nowhere (there was an error_exit() that should just be a warning), 734and provides error messages for files we could open but not read.</p> 735 736<p><u>Library</u>: 737New library functions: strend() complements strstart(), minof()/maxof() 738are min/max macros that evalute arguments once and autodetect type (why 739isn't this in libc?), xmmap() checks MAP_FAILED (which is not NULL).</p> 740 741<a name="21-02-2017" /><a href="#21-02-2017"><hr><h2><b>February 21, 2017</b></h2></a> 742<blockquote><p>Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the 743Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention 744away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.</p> 745<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 746 747<p>Despite everything, <a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.3.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.3</a> 748(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.3>git commit</a>) 749is out. The <u>new commands</u> this time are <b>ftpget</b>, <b>ftpput</b>, <b>microcom</b>, and <b>ascii</b>.<p> 750 751<p>We also had two command _demotions_ out of defconfig: 752<b>hostid</b> got moved to toys/example and 753switched to "default n" because despite <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/gethostid.html>still being in posix</a> 754the concept of a unique 32 bit number identifying a system is something 755Linux outgrew about the time Pauline Middelink wrote the first IP 756Masquerading code. And Elliott did a complete rewrite of <b>dmesg</b> introducing 757two codepaths that I didn't get a chance to unify and didn't want to 758hold up the release for, so that's back in pending.</p> 759 760<p><u>New features</u>: Rob added units to <b>find</b> -atime and friends 761(with the legacy -amin alias). Elliott added color and -w to dmesg, fallocate 762-o, and improved file's ELF parsing. Steve Muckle added -d and finit_module 763support to modprobe. Rob and Elliott tweaked the 764ps/top display format a bit more (extending the USER field from 8 to 18 chars 765and putting + at the end of string fields that got truncated). 766df -a isn't entirely new, but wasn't documented and needed a bugfix.</p> 767 768<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 769Last release broke oneit because -c didn't get moved to xopen_stdio() (oops). 770Rob and Elliott simultaneously spotted ps padding each line to 99999 771chars when there's no tty (serial console or adb); now it pads to 80 in 772that case but also switches on -w to avoid field truncation. The "tty" 773field also sometimes had trailing debris (that's fixed now). And "top" was 774endlessly redrawing with out tty because receipt of the ANSI size probe 775results would set SIGWINCH, and handling that sent another ansi probe. (Sigh.) 776And while we're there, replace "ADDR" with "BIT" in ps -l so there are 777more than 4 chars left for the "CMD" field on 64 bit systems.</p> 778 779<p>Izabera pointed out that split -b and -l can't mix, and suggested seq should 780multiply to avoid accumulating rounding errors from repeated fractional 781increments. Wang Xiao Jian fixed a bug in sort -k. 782Elliott let getprop use the @ character in property names, and 783Dimitry Ivanov removed the name length limit for system properties. 784Elliott also improved some error reporting and improved top -H's display 785of thread names. 786 787<p>Josh Gao pointed out that recursive operations on . and .. could be ignored 788in chmod -R (and the resulting generic fix to dirtree_notdotdot() fixed 789it in several other places).</p> 790 791<p>Justin Cormack caught tar producing a warning to stdout that screwed up 792"tar c" to stdout. 793Rob fixed an option parsing bug (where switching off a --longopt in menuconfig 794confused the parser), and another one where an option excluding itself 795(ala "abc[-ab][!abc]" with "command -a -b") would segfault.</p> 796 797<p>There's some sort of gcc stack over-optimization bug where musl-libc's 798version of vfork() doesn't get marked with attribute(returns_twice) so 799stack varabiles in the same function after that get semi-randomly overwritten 800when the optimizer decides to reclaim the space. So add the attribute 801to the function the XVFORK() wrapper macro calls. (It's a nommu thing.)</p> 802 803<p>Fixed a couple variable size mismatch bugs that were only tested on 64 bit 804(printf %x 64) or only tested on 32 bit (modprobe), removed some 805unnecessary casts in stat.</p> 806 807<p>Continuing attempts to build under Android NDK brought up that posix 808defines the global 'stdout' as a macro, which older versions of bionic 809turned into an array member, but a function was using it as an argument 810name. (This worked in the AOSP build because it only builds against current 811bionic, where there's a global 'stdout'.)</p> 812 813<p>Several commits argued with clang's warning generation, eventually 814settling on a variant of __attribute__((__shut_up__)).</p> 815 816<p>Android should no longer give spurious error messages 817when you "ps -A | head" about EPIPE on output. (Older versions of bionic 818set an error handler on SIGPIPE, but it shouldn't do that now. More recent 819versions of adb set the SIGPIPE handler to SIGIGN instead of SIGDFL, 820leading to write returning an error message instead of silently killing 821the program. So we set it back to the default.)</p> 822 823<p><u>Docs</u>: 824Removed website link to the gmane archive (which didn't survive gmane's 825change of ownership). The FAQ now answers a _second_ question. (Woo!) 826Some roadmap updates.</p> 827 828<p><u>Build tweaks</u>: 829Upgraded "make install_airlock" target to only warn about missing 830commands (unless $PEDANTIC is set) when it sets up the hermetic build 831path. (The plan is still to implement everything but the toolchain 832binaries in toybox, but in the meantime we're symlinking other stuff from 833the $HOST that isn't ready yet. See 834<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> for an example using 835this.)</p> 836 837<p>Elliott and Rob continue to poke at building toybox with Android's NDK, 838but it's a work in progress (<a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-December/008767.html>thread</a>). Various changes 839removing libcutils dependencies and adding an selinux dependency to getprop 840are fallout from this.</p> 841 842<p>Cross-compiling from Macs needs to use "gsed" instead of apple's 843version, so teach the build to use that name if it exists in the $PATH. 844If you try to build without running config first, you should get better 845error reporting now. Added a workaround for Centos' broken "which" command 846producing output when it _can't_ find a name in the $PATH.</p> 847 848<p><u>Library</u>: 849The new dirtree flag DIRTREE_PROC skips non-numeric entries so things 850like ps and top can scan /proc more efficiently.</p> 851 852<a name="21-10-2016" /><a href="#21-10-2016"><hr><h2><b>October 21, 2016</b></h2></a> 853<blockquote><p>Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat, 854we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your 855own problem.</p><p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 856 857<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.2</a> 858(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.2>git commit</a>) 859is out.</p> 860 861<p>During this development cycle, Elliott Hughes <a href=http://androidbackstage.blogspot.com/2016/07/episode-53-adb-on-adb.html>got interviewed 862on the ADB podcast</a> 863and 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>). 864Both talk about toybox and many other things. 865The web page also grew a new <a href=faq.html>FAQ page</a>, currently with 866just the one.</p> 867 868<p>New comands added to defconfig are <b>tunctl</b>, 869<b>log</b>, <b>start</b>, <b>stop</b>, and <b>sendevent</b>. 870The commands <b>file</b> and <b>netstat</b> got promoted out of pending. 871Pending added <b>chrt</b>, <b>setfattr</b>, and <b>getfattr</b>, and saw 872a lot of cleanups to diffstat and dd but not enough to promote them to 873defconfig yet. A new toys/net directory was added, moving ifconfig, netcat, 874netstat, rfkill, and tunctl there so far.</p> 875 876<p><b>Upgrades</b>: All commands now parse --version when they understand 877--help, but "true" and "false" should now ignore their arguments entirely. 878We taught stat to handle "%12x" and "%.12x" printf-style escapes, which 879apparently other versions do. The ifconfig output now shows the interface's 880device driver. Added patch -d and --dry-run, wc can now do -cm together, 881find has a NOP -noleaf so scripts that use that don't break, add -c to md5sum 882and sha1sum. Elliott taught ps to treat extra aguments as additional -p 883pids, implemented xxd -s, did a number of upgrades to file (added -HL, 884support for ar files, improved ELF support to report android API level 885and stripped/not stripped and it no longer prints a guessed build ID type). 886Elliott also added optional build-time support for using openssl's 887assembly-optimized md5sum/sha1sum implementations (leading to a new 888<a href=design.html>design</a> policy on shared libraries).</p> 889 890<p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Too many fixes to "ps" and "touch" to list, from both 891Elliott and Rob. Rob taught sed to handle s/[[:space:]/]// type sequences 892properly, switched grep to a better 893workaround 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, 894made du max out at 2 terabytes instead of 2 gigabytes on 32-bit systems 895(it was always designed to, but was missing a typecast), 896fixed the option parsing infrastructure (config options that remove command 897line options got the placeholders wrong), fix to printf for printing 898octal digits and handling the (posix-mandated) difference between %b and 899non-%b octal output, reading from "-" no longer closes stdin when done, 900netcat -L works with nommu (although it may need more portability work), 901and you can now "make test_scankey" if you want to. Several commands 902(stat, makedeves, chgrp, cp, find) handled user name lookup failure badly 903(stat was segfaulting if you interrogated a file belonging to a nonexistent 904user, "chown 12345 file" errored out if you didn't have that user 905in /etc/passwd... now they should all print/accept the number when 906appropriate). "LC_ALL=C ls -Cs --color" produces the same output 907as other versions (two spaces padding, -k hardwired on).<p> 908 909<p>Kyungsik Lee fixed a bug 910in cp (readlink() doesn't actually null terminate the string it reads in), 911Elliott Hughes made pgrep/pkill return success/failure, fixed trailing 912whitespace in netstat, fixed a SMACK symbol conflict due to linux/xattr.h 913changing, fixed ls -sh, and added a lot of 914stuff to the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap page</a>. 915Izabera pointed out cmp -l and -s can't be selected at the same time, 916that timeout was never actually checking -v, that ls should default to -q 917when output is to a tty, and that "file -" would sometimes try to open "-" 918instead of stdin. 919Usischev Yury pointed out a use after free error, and that id shouldn't 920call exit() directly. Matthias Urhahn pointed out that stat(2) returns 921hardwired 512-byte units, so stat.c was wrong. David Hedges pointed out 922that route could only handle 10 character interface names when the kernel 923can do 15 (it's still in pending for a reason, but fixed). Evgenii 924Stepanov found and helped diagnose one of the more subtle ps bugs fixed 925this time around.</p> 926 927<p>Calling "make test_blah" no longer causes make to error out if the last 928test fails (and thus returns a nonzero error code). 929Building single commands and the multiplexer used to require a "make clean" 930between them (because they had different config files both of which were older 931than generated/config.h so it didn't get rebuilt; now it just always 932rebuilds it).</p> 933 934<p>The defconfig build is now slightly less broken on older centos versions 935(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> 936 937<p>Several commands were over-using xprintf(), which flushes its output 938to check for error (something you only need to do maybe once per line, 939and even then maybe only in loops because xexit() flushes and checks 940ferror() for you and adjusts the exit code if we wrote stuff to stdout 941that couldn't be printed). Lots of little flushes are inefficient, 942so most things can use normal printf(). (Retransmission 943of short writes is presumably libc's problem since it's buffering the 944output and all.)</p> 945 946<p><b>Library:</b> 947New library functions readlink0() and readlinkat0() which properly null 948terminates the symlink value (which the stock libc function inexplicably 949doesn't). 950The new do_lines() function interates reading lines from a filehandle 951and calling a function on each line. 952New function pollinate() factoring out netcat's poll() loop so things 953like telnet can use it. 954New functions getusername() and getgroupname() return a 955char * given a uid/gid (and return a string representation of the number 956if the lookup fails), and xgetpwnamid/xgetgrnamid were renamed to 957xgetuid/xgetgid and now return an integer instead of a struct (also helping 958handle lookup failures, you can still return the uid/get for "12345").</p> 959 960<p>Switched atolx() to use long long internally. 961Renamed xopen() to xopen_stdio() and made a new xopen() that never returns 962stdin, stdout, or stderr (duping /dev/null into the filehandles as necessary). 963New function xopenro() opens a file read only with one less argument, and 964understands that "-" means stdin. New flag WARN_ONLY tells these functions 965to just print a warning on failure, and return -1 instead of exiting. 966Misc new functions like openro() which defaults to the WARN_ONLY behavior 967and notstdio() which dup()s a filehandle up beyond stdin/out/err backfilling 968with /dev/null as necessary. The WARN_ONLY flag let us remove the failok 969argument from loopfiles().</p> 970 971<p>New TOYFLAG_NOHELP disables --help processing (which "true" and "false" 972should not do).</b> 973 974<p>The test suite now has NOSPACE=1 to ignore whitespace (using diff -b to 975check results), which helps TEST_HOST pass the same tests as toybox. 976Fixes to chattr and date tests. It also has a new variable $C with the 977absolute path to the command being tested (bypassing shell builtins), 978and a function testcmd() which is just like testing() except it prepends 979the command name ($C) to the test command line as well as the test 980description.</p> 981 982<a name="02-06-2016" /><a href="#02-06-2016"><hr><h2><b>June 2, 2016</b></h2></a> 983<blockquote><p>When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but 984highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic 985analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental 986signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's 987brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows 988quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of 989liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.</p> 990<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 991 992<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.1</a> 993(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.1>git commit</a>) 994is out. (Yes, I forgot to update the --version string, but I already 995uploaded the <a href=downloads/binaries/0.7.1>binaries</a>.)</p> 996 997<p>The website has https support now, you can "make cat ps ls" 998to get standalone commands (and "make list list_pending" to see what's 999available), and a whole lot of bugfixes and new options to existing 1000commands.</p>
1001 1002<h2>New Commands</h2> 1003<p>Rob implemented <b>ulimit</b>. In pending, Elliott Hughes implemented 1004file. and Lipi Lee implemented a simple wget. (Pending also had minor 1005cleanups to more and lsof, but no promotions this time around.)</p> 1006 1007<h2>New Options</h2> 1008<p>Izabera implemented env -u, suggested adding seq -w, made factor 1009use full unsigned 64 bit math even on 32 bit platforms, pointed out base64 1010-w0 should disable wrapping, and sped up wc -c. 1011Elliott Hughes added mount -o relatime, xxd -p -r, and od -w. 1012Sameer Pradhan (or possibly Bilal Qureshi) suggested adding stat -tL -c %m%t%T. 1013Tom Cherry added getprop -Z. Paul Barker added hostname -b and -F. 1014Rob added ls -b, made ls -q work with utf8, 1015made sed -f - read from stdin, and added top -O (like ps -O).</p> 1016 1017<p>Elliott and Rob <b>added Thread support to ps and top</b>, 1018with -o TID, TNAME. We also added -o PCY (android scheduling policy), 1019-o BIT (process is 32 or 64 bit), and -o TNAME now shows the parent 1020command name for threads.</p> 1021 1022<h2>Documentation</h2> 1023 1024<p>Rob added the sed invocations to convert tabs/spaces and back to 1025design.html. Isaac Dunham updated hexedit's help text. 1026Jakob Flierl pointed out a broken URL in the README.</p> 1027 1028<p>Rob also redid the naming scheme of sed's pattern manipulation code to 1029remove the gratuitous references to Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series, since it 1030was confusing people.</p> 1031 1032<h2>Bugfixes</h2> 1033 1034<p>Grep -H and -n should now work properly with -ABC. Andy Chu pointed out an 1035out of bounds access for zero length lines in rev, fixed a buffer overflow 1036in diff -r, and fixed operator precedence in expr (although Rob is rewriting 1037chunks of expr so toysh can use its plumbing for $(( )) ). 1038Patrick Ohly fixed the too-aggressive suid permission dropping logic. 1039Josh Gao fixed a segfault when find -iname got no argument, and 1040made tail -f work right with just one file argument. 1041Tom Marshall cleaned up tar's long filename support and improved 1042the tar tests, and reported another find bug (with -iname -o -iname not 1043tracking copy lifetimes properly) that got fixed.</p> 1044 1045<p>Elliott Hughes fixed wc -c to not trust zero length files to actually be 1046zero length (/proc does that), fixed "mount -o rw,remount /system" on 1047Android, removed trailing spaces on ps -o cmdline, fixed pkill -9 and 1048the corresponding tests, made "insmod -" work, fixed top -b and tail -NUM, 1049pointed out that ps shouldn't trim numeric fields for display size limits, 1050and added some more 1051explicit "sort" calls to make pipelines so build tempfiles are easier to cache. 1052Rob <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/32b3587af261>fixed an insane sed thing</a> the perl 5.22 build was doing. 1053Fixed mount -o to properly pass in leftover string data, and 1054<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 1055to fix some bitrot in the kernel NFS driver's string parsing attached 1056to that message).</p> 1057 1058<p>George Burgess IV corrected some variable types in traceroute. 1059Base64 now wraps == properly. Fixed two bzcat segfaults reported by 1060John Regehr. Andy Chu found a segfault in "sed -e 'c\'" with no trailing 1061line, and implemented mv -n and cp -n. The cyanogenmod guys pointed out that 1062cp -a shouldn't complain if a non-root user can't chown, and we added 1063the output path to cp -r error messages while we were there (before was just 1064the filename).</p> 1065 1066<p>Samuel Holland fixed blkid's handling of vfat labels, and 1067fixed a segfault when basename was passed an empty string and an empty 1068suffix. Davis Mosenkovs fixed touch -t seconds parsing. 1069Rob fixed a bunzip bug reported by John Regehr (the bad CRC 1070error message was printing a NUL argument).</p> 1071 1072<p>Not all of the commands build standalone, but more of them do now; 1073scripts/single.sh can now build a "mv" that isn't actually "cp". 1074The dependencies are more granualr, so "make top; make ps" no longer 1075produces a broken ps that ignores -A (because ps.o wasn't getting rebuilt 1076even though top had the FLAG macros for -A zeroed).</p> 1077 1078<h2>Build</h2> 1079<p>Rob added a <b>warning when building commands out of 1080pending</b>. (The pending directory is full of code that hasn't been 1081properly vetted. Use at your own risk.)</p> 1082 1083<p><b>New build targets let you build individual commands by name</b>, ala 1084"make ls cat ps", and you can run the test suite for each standalone 1085command with "make test_ls" and such. 1086"make list" shows all such standalone commands in defconfig, and 1087"make list_pending" shows unfinished commands from toys/pending 1088("make list list_pending" shows both together). "make clean" now deletes 1089these filenames at the top level, and the corresponding unstripped files 1090live in the directory generated/unstripped.</p> 1091 1092<p>Nicholas Boichat suggested switching make.sh to use $! for process 1093enumeration during parallel builds (which is both more efficient and more 1094portable), and suggested shell builtin replacements for wc/awk/sed so the 1095build loop has fewer forks now.</p> 1096 1097<p>Lots of work on the test suite, much of it due to Andy Chu. It now 1098consistently prints the name of the command being tested at the start of each 1099test (and the common infrastructure does that, not each individual test), and 1100"make tests" actually runs all the available tests now. 1101Seperated pgrep and pkill tests, split lsattr/chattr, added fstype and base64 1102tests. The "tests/files" directory now collects files for tests to 1103use, with blkid, bzcat, and utf8 subdirectories: the $FILES variable 1104gives a path to it, so "$FILES/blkid/ext2.bz2" and so on. 1105The testsuite now has test files with 3 different types of "not utf8 output" 1106sequences that require escaping, plus some combining character torture 1107tests, direction reversals, and so on.</p> 1108 1109<p>Added dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK to various pending commands that need 1110nommu conversion (which should fix the allyesconfig build).</p> 1111 1112<p>Static builds with selinux should work again.</p> 1113 1114<h2>Library</h2> 1115 1116<p>New bufgetgrgid() and bufgetpwuid() functions cache previous lookup info 1117rather than repeatedly traversing /etc/passwd and /etc/group (which is slow). 1118Added xpipe() to lib to catch pipe creation failure. 1119The HELP_ macros generated by config2help.c now use a capital prefix 1120to avoid collicing with help_exit() and such.</p> 1121 1122<p>The dirtree infrastructure got a cleanup pass in preparation for adding 1123infinite recursion depth support (needed by rm -r), updated the 1124<a href=code.html#ib_dirtree>documentation</a> to describe the new 1125semantics (removing dirtree_start() and adding dirtree_flagread()). 1126Now dirtree_recurse() takes the new dirfd as an argument.</p> 1127 1128<p>Split out _xexit() from xexit() and let sigatexit() set multiple 1129callbacks.</p> 1130 1131<p>For years the man pages have said to #include <sys/types.h> to get 1132major/minor/makedev but now that glibc 1133<a href=https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-11/msg00253.html>has vowed 1134to break existing programs</a> and replace it with another nonstandard header 1135not in posix or lsb, we added our own functions to lib/ to do the transform 1136ourselves (based on what the kernel actually expects).</p> 1137 1138<h2>Portability</h2> 1139 1140<p>Debian unstable started needing an extra header #include for some reason, and 1141although printf("%.*s", INT_MAX, s) worked fine on Ubuntu 12.04 it 1142didn't on 14.04, so added a workaround for that. Typecast a printf because 1143wchar_t isn't a rigidly defined size. RLIMIT_RTTIME was 1144added to the kernel in 2008 but you can't expect uClibc to have noticed yet, 1145nor did it #define MS_RELATIME (added in 2006), or prlimit (2010)... 1146(Given the improvements in musl and bionic, uClibc support may be dropped 1147in a future release.) Given that the xattr functions were added during 1148linux 2.5, we can #include its header unconditionally.</p> 1149 1150<p>Renamed basename_r() to something else to avoid conflicting with freebsd's 1151libc, and both scripts/install.h and scripts/config2help.c no longer include 1152toys.h (to make cross-compiling from systems we don't run on easier).</p> 1153 1154<p>Debian bug 635570 did something unspeakably nonportable, depending on 1155"sed -e 'a\'" (with no next line of the pattern, so an unterminated 1156continuation) to add a newline to the last line of input if and only if 1157that last line of the input didn't have a newline, and to take no other 1158action. This is well into "depending on a bug" territory, but we implemented 1159it because otherwise Debian's install broke. (Of course this behavior 1160is undocumented, non-obvious, and doesn't really make logical sense.)</p> 1161 1162<p>CONFIG_TOYBOX_NORECURSE now disables the stack measuring logic (which 1163was giving some "security" code fits). Also we typecast pointers to (long) 1164before comparing them to avoid spurious compiler "optimizations" that 1165break the code.</p> 1166 1167<a name="02-02-2016" /><a href="#02-02-2016"><hr><h2><b>February 2, 2016</b></h2></a> 1168<blockquote><p>"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that 1169quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with 1170you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." 1171- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1172 1173<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.0</a> 1174(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.0>git commit</a>) 1175is out.</p> 1176 1177<p>The new commands in defconfig are <b>iotop</b>, <b>top</b>, <b>pgrep</b>, 1178and <b>pkill</b> 1179(most replacing corresponding versions from pending). Added grep -ABC, 1180swapon -d (discard), mkswap -L (label) and UUID support, and find -delete. 1181Izabera added free -h and unshare -f. Josh Gao implemented tail -f. 1182Jose Bollo submitted cp --preserve=context,attr. Kylie McClain added 1183mktemp -u.</p> 1184 1185<p>In pending there's the start of a vi command, and Sameer Pradhan contributed 1186a new dhcp6. This cycle saw several rounds of route cleanup and a little dhcp 1187cleanup, but neither are complete yet. Lipi Lee did some cleanup to netstat.c 1188and Elliott Hughes removed warnings from traceroute.</p> 1189 1190<p>Lots of updates to ps: several new -o options, -k (--sort) -O and -M, 1191improved compatibility with Android's historical behavior, and 1192extensive internal code cleanup (including the removal of all 1193the magic constants).</p> 1194 1195<h3><b>Website</b></h3> 1196 1197<p>Dreamhost restored the <a href="#12-21-2015">missing 11 months</a> 1198to the mailing list archive, in the process deleting the month after 1199that. Now they've asked if I have mbox files archiving the new 1200gap (between December 20, 2015 to January 21, 2016, and presumably they 1201could also fill in the gap from December 14, 2014 to January 3, 2015 that's 1202been there since the last time they did this), 1203but due to some gmail filtering I've 1204<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2012.html#15-10-2012>never 1205been able to disable</a>, my copy of those files is spread among 3 different 1206mbox files I'd have to sort/filter/collate. (It's on the todo list.)</p> 1207 1208<p>Added a code of conduct to the README (we're 1209<a href=https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/code-of-conduct>borrowing twitter's</a>) because somebody 1210made it necessary.</p> 1211 1212<h3><b>Bugfixes</b></h3> 1213<p>Fixed another sed bug where any ] right after [ was skipped (not just the 1214first one in the range, so [[] didn't terminate). Fixed sort -f and added test cases. 1215Assume 80 columns in "ls -m | cat", ls -L is no longer backwards, 1216and ls of files with no paths no longer uses an uninitialized (zero) dirfd. 1217Several bugfixes 1218to find (Gilad Arnold fixed -perm, Daniel K. Levy fixed "find . -exec echo {}", 1219and while we're there I fixed find --prune, made "find . -execdir 1220echo {} + -execdir ls {} +" work, and ripped out the environment size 1221measuring code that checked for a 128k limit removed back in linux 2.6.22). 1222Elliott Hughes fixed the date command's parsing of 4 digit 1223years and documented the %s escape, fixed hwclock -u, and pointed out 1224that runcon needs to exec to do its job (not recursively call another 1225command_main() in the same process). Tom Marshall reported that blkid was 1226handling ext2 wrong. Mike Moreton corrected cpio extraction's uid and gid 1227values, and added a --no-preserve-owner option. Fixed the SUID permission 1228dropping logic (which was a bit over-zealous, preventing some commands from 1229running at all).</p> 1230 1231<p>I'm told that debian-testing broke its libc so the nsenter build breaks, 1232but my attempts to install the debian-testing network cd image under 1233qemu keep breaking. Maybe someday they'll fix it enough I can actually 1234reproduce the problem. (Debootstrap under unbuntu builds an ubuntu-flavored 1235chroot in which toybox builds fine.)</p> 1236 1237<h3><b>Documentation</b></h3> 1238<p>Rewrite of the about.html page, tweaks to design.html, and a re-triage of 1239sbase in roadmap.html. Update to mkstatus.py to collate multiple span 1240tags with the same id, resulting in a larger status.html page (which 1241was previously ignoring some commands in the roadmap).</p> 1242 1243<p>Expanded the defconfig/allyesconfig/allnoconfighelp text in "make help" 1244to explain what they're for.</p> 1245 1246<h3><b>infrastructure</b></h3> 1247<ul> 1248<li><p>Expanded toys.optargs to 64 bits so a command can have more than 32 options.</p></li> 1249<li><p>Added NOEXIT() wrapper to turn xwrap() functions into warning versions 1250using the existing longjump(toys.rebound) infrastructure.</p></li> 1251<li><p>Renamed dirtree->data to dirfd and stopped storing symlink length 1252into it (this fixed a bug where following symlinks to directories 1253didn't give a valid directory filehandle, noticeable with ls -Z).</p></li> 1254<li><p>New TAGGED_ARRAY() infrastructure generates index and bitmask macros 1255for arrays of structures starting with a name string.</p></li> 1256<li><p>New lib/linestack.c for utf8 fontmetrics (draw_str() and utf8len() 1257and so on), and for tracking multiple lines of text 1258(vi, less, shell history) that need wordwrapping and scrolling up/down.</p></li> 1259<li><p>Upgrades to lib/interestingtimes.c: scan_key() now has a timeout 1260in milliseconds and recognizes more sequences including ANSI 1261window size probes. New utf8 test files in tests/files/utf8 including 1262sequence reversing, stacked combining chars, and all three types of 1263unprintable sequences (low ascii <32 ala ^X, invalid utf8 sequences ala 1264<AB><CD>, and invalid unicode code points ala U+1234).</p></li> 1265<li><p>More comma handling code in lib.c: comma_args()</p></li> 1266<li><p>Added error_msg_raw() to shut up fortify's endless static checking false 1267positives.</p></li> 1268<li><p>readfileat() can now realloc() in a loop to read long files 1269("zcat | insmod" needed it).</p></li> 1270</ul> 1271 1272<h3><b>Roadmap</b></h3> 1273<p>We're getting close to having a self-hosting development environment 1274using toybox for the command line. The remaining busybox commands in 1275<a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>Aboriginal Linux</a> are:</p> 1276 1277<blockquote><p><b> 1278awk bunzip2 bzcat bzip2 dd diff expr fdisk ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip gzip 1279less ping route sh sha512sum tar test tr unxz vi wget xzcat zcat 1280</b></p></blockquote> 1281 1282<p>And the remaining non-busybox commands in Aboriginal Linux's build/host 1283directory (from the distcc, genext2fs, e2fsprogs, zlib, and squashfs packagesi) 1284are:</p> 1285 1286<blockquote><p><b> 1287mke2fs fsck.ext2 resize2fs distcc genext2fs unsquashfs distccd mksquashfs tune2fs 1288</b></p></blockquote> 1289 1290<p>Squashfs and distcc are probably out of scope for toybox, but mke2fs, 1291fsck.ext2, resize2fs, genext2fs, and tune2fs should all be added to the 1292above "busybox" replacement list.</p> 1293 1294<p>Remind me to include this countdown in future releases. Once they've all 1295been replaced, the next goal is <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>building AOSP under itself</a>.</p> 1296 1297<p>See the full <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> and <a href=status.html>status</a> 1298pages for more details.</p> 1299 1300<a name="12-21-2015" /><a href="#12-21-2015"><hr><h2><b>December 21, 2015</b></h2></a> 1301 1302<p>Yes, 11 months have gone missing from the mailing list web archive.</p> 1303 1304<p>Yesterday evening Dreamhost's mailman server went down (timing out trying 1305to connect). I poked them about it, they 1306<a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/678781271670149121>blamed 1307DNS</a>, I explained that the hang was _after_ the DNS lookup and 1308entered the dig info into the trouble ticket showing the IPs the DNS 1309queries were returning, they reinstalled the server at that IP from what I 1310assume was their most recent backup, and that's how 11 months of messages 1311vanished out of the archive.</p> 1312 1313<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 1314can do. <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>Last time</a> 1315this sort of thing <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>happened</a> 1316we went back and forth for months, so I added a link to a backup web 1317archive (in the nav bar on the left) that isn't controlled by dreamhost, 1318and thus doesn't gratuitously lose data on a regular basis. (I note 1319the earlier hole in Dreamhost's archive was never fixed either. That 1320was data never getting archived, this is a year's worth of data that 1321was in the archive until yesterday vanishing after the fact.)</p> 1322 1323<p>If you're wondering why the <a href=http://lists.landley.net>top level</a> 1324list page has been "temporarily disabled" for multiple years now... you'd have 1325to ask Dreamhost. I know I have. More than a dozen times.</p> 1326 1327<a name="03-11-2015" /><a href="#03-11-2015"><hr><h2><b>November 3, 2015</b></h2></a> 1328<blockquote><p>"Alright," said Ford. "How would you react if I said that I'm 1329not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity 1330of Betelgeuse?" Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way. "I don't know," he 1331said, taking a pull of beer. "Why - do you think it's the sort of thing you're 1332likely to say?" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1333 1334<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.1</a> 1335(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.1>git commit</a>) 1336is out.</p> 1337 1338<p>We have a new <b>ps</b> command with all the -o fields posix wants (although 1339it doesn't accept BSD non-dash option syntax yet), and <b>bunzip2</b> (not just 1340bzcat but the proper extract-in-place command). 1341Sameer Pradhan added <b>hostid</b> and <b>fsync</b>. 1342Elliott Hughes added <b>flock</b>. 1343 1344<p>The people waiting for <b>human readable number support</b> (du -hH, ls -h, 1345and so on) can thank Elliott Hughes for implementing it. (Our output doesn't 1346exactly match others' because we our "binary" mode will say 1.0G instead of 13471024M, which is a bug in the other one we didn't emulate.)</p> 1348 1349<p>The other big news is <b>nommu support</b>, tested on the new 1350<a href=http://nommu.org/jcore>jcore</a> processor but presumaby working 1351on any nommu system. A few commands don't support nommu yet, but those 1352are disabled by dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK in menuconfig when building 1353for nommu. The roadmap now has a large section analyzing the uClinux 1354project (note that <a href=http://nommu.org>nommu.org</a> is slowly replacing 1355<a href=http://uclinux.org>uclinux.org</a> as the standard repository of 1356all knowledge and wisdom about nommu. The old site <a href=#12-02-2012>contains 1357much that is apocryphal</a>, or at least wildly inaccurate, and the new one 1358is trying to improve on that).</p> 1359 1360<p>Both "make change" and scripts/single.sh (for building standalone commands 1361without the multiplexer logic) now use the top level .config 1362for toybox global settings such as Linux Security Blanket Module selection, 1363(so make defconfig before change now).</p> 1364 1365<p>Documentation updates to the <a href=code.html>code</a> and 1366<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> pages.</p> 1367 1368<h3>pending</h3> 1369 1370<p>In the pending directory Sameer Pradhan added tftp, 1371and Elliott Hughes sent lsof. Isaac Dunham upgraded mdev, 1372reboot, init, login, and modprobe, and fixed a distro-specific build break in 1373scripts/mkflags.h. Elliott Hughes and Lipi Lee made netstat -p handle 1374command lines longer than 21 characters, and Elliott fixed netstat -e and 1375some build warnings. Yeongdeok Suh fixed a warning in dhcpd. 1376I started cleanup on pgrep/pkill.</p> 1377 1378<h3>Command updates, bugfixes, and infrastructure</h3> 1379 1380<p>The multiplexer's "command not found" error exit is now 127, so now you can't 1381distinguish between a command not being found in the multiplexer and 1382the multiplexer itself not being found by the shell, because people wanted 1383that for some reason.</p> 1384 1385<p>Elliott Hughes made date reject invalid dates rather 1386than set the clock to something weird (setting the clock 100 years into the 1387future makes most Linux desktops surprisingly unhappy, and ntpdate won't fix it 1388either), fixed several ls -l display issues (user/group field ordering, 1389make user/group/lsmcontext left aligned), did the aforementioned 1390extensive work on human readable number output, fixed ionice's default 1391class, fixed a mv overwrite bug, made df's columns auto-size, added 1392--ppid and -Z to ps, and teamed up with Daniel K. Levy to fix 1393a segfault in find's handling of -newer -group or -user.</p> 1394 1395<p>Hyejin Kim added stat -c %T support. Colin Cross worked 1396on vmstat fixing 1397a header printing bug and calculating the bi and bo columns in the right 1398units. Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra 1399newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed. 1400Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain 1401pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax. 1402Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows 1403all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p> 1404 1405<p>Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra 1406newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed. 1407Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain 1408pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax. 1409Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows 1410all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p> 1411 1412<p>Two large thinko fixes in oneit: -3 was always enabled (which would 1413eventually block if the child never read the exiting PID numbers from its file 1414descriptor #3 until the pipe filled up), and the signal handlers weren't 1415set up right (for requesting semi-graceful halt/poweroff/reboot). 1416Calling install without a mode is now 0755, and install -g 0 no longer clashes 1417with cp --preserve. Better error message for ls -r on unreadable 1418directories, and ls -Z now uses O_PATH (with the /proc/self/fd/%d 1419workaround for kernel stupidity as necessary).</p> 1420 1421<p>Date now understands @unixtime[.fraction] and uses -D for 1422the set-side format (matching busybox's extension for this). The seq -f 1423string now checks that it's got exactly one %f escape with the correct 1424attributes (and a whole bunch of test cases for it). Fixed a bug 1425in od that screwed up the position indicator on arm and mips. 1426In stat the d/h units moved from %d %D to the default string. 1427And patch can now correctly apply hunks with trailing context to the start of 1428the file.</p> 1429 1430<p>The prompt argument moved out of yesno() (the caller can print the prompt 1431themselves). Replaced toys.exithelp with help_exit(). Added new 1432XVFORK() macro, and xpopen_both() calls /proc/self/exe when passed 1433a NULL argv (see cpio -p for example usage). Replaced toys.recurse 1434with toys.stacktop so the recurse or re-exec decision is now based 1435on bytes of stack space used. Marked a bunch of command-local functions 1436static.</p> 1437 1438<p>New additions to lib/ include strlower(), xconnect(), and the 1439aforementioned help_exit(). 1440The testsuite now has some infrastructure tests based on "example" 1441commands such as toys/examples/test_human_readable.c. 1442The login command finally got a long-overdue cleanup (it's one of the 1443commands that predate the "pending" directory but were part of the reason 1444for it). Hexedit had an 1445uninitialized variable (of course gcc didn't spot it, it was too busy 1446warning about "may be used uninitialized but never actually is" variables).</p> 1447 1448<p>Tweaked makefile so 1449"make CROSS_COMPILE=prefix-" (as well as "CROSS_COMPILE=prefix- make", 1450which still works). Toybox is now installed chmod -w so broken installers 1451(like the bunzip2 package's) that try to overwrite existing binaries won't 1452knock out the whole of toybox. 1453GCC 5.2.0 stopped being able to compile Linux 2.6.12's kconfig, but 1454we added a workaround. You can now build uptime without utmpx.h. 1455Alejandro Joya pointed out that enabling smack required smack on the host 1456as well as target when cross compiling, which is now fixed.</p> 1457 1458<p>Note: toybox can autodetect nommu support when building with a uClibc 1459toolchain 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>, 1460but <a href=http://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>with musl-libc</a> 1461you'll have to enable CONFIG_TOYBOX_MUSL_NOMMU_IS_BROKEN to work around the 1462fact they provide a non-functional fork() implementation that always returns 1463-ENOSYS, to prevent you from compile-time probing for nommu support when 1464cross-compiling. Unfortunately "preventing you from probing" seems to be 1465an explicit policy with musl, they also don't provide an "#ifdef __MUSL__" 1466because their library is perfect and you're only ever allowed to work around 1467other people's bugs, not theirs. So we have to use menuconfig to manually 1468enable musl-specific bug workarounds.</p> 1469 1470<a name="23-07-2015" /><a href="#23-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2015</b></h2></a> 1471<p>I recreated the <a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>0.6.0 source tarball</a> 1472(new sha1sum 08fb1c23f520c25a15f262a8a95ea5b676a98d54) 1473because I forgot to add --prefix to the git archive command when I updated 1474my release script from mercurial, so the files weren't in an enclosing 1475directory. (Ooops.)</p> 1476 1477<a name="19-07-2015" /><a href="#19-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 19, 2015</b></h2></a> 1478<blockquote><p> 1479The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic 1480component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar 1481hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it 1482around in." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy </p></blockquote> 1483 1484<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.0</a> 1485(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.0>git commit</a>) 1486is out. (Yes, git. See the <a href=#05-04-2015>previous news entry</a>.)</p> 1487 1488<p>Sorry for the unusually long gap between releases. Since last release Ye 1489Olde Project Maintainer traveled to japan twice and had two more "once 1490a century" floods at home. (Probably a coincidence.) Still catching up.</p> 1491 1492<h3><b>CELF/ELC talk and Wikipedia[citation needed] article</b></h3> 1493 1494<p>I gave another State Of The Toybox talk 1495(<a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04XwAbtPmAg>video</a> 1496<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2015.txt>outline</a>), in which I 1497repeat my <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#07-11-2013>perennial</a> 1498<a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/557309224535851009>complaint</a> 1499that Wikipedia[citation needed] 1500<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox>still</a> 1501<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#Controversy_over_Toybox>says</a> 1502toybox was relicensed before its hiatus, when relicensing was why 1503the hiatus ended.</p> 1504 1505<p>Since Wikipedia[citation needed] seems unable to do the 1506<a href=#15-11-2011>most</a> 1507<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/log/tip/LICENSE>basic</a> 1508<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011>research</a> on 1509this point, and has stuck to an incorrect sequence of events for years, 1510I've been gradually escalating my attempts to correct them. Toybox 1511came out of mothballs in November 2011 <b>because</b> it could be 1512relicensed. That's what opened up a new niche busybox wasn't already 1513filling with a 10 year headstart.</p> 1514 1515<a name="asterisk_back" /> 1516<p>The article has plenty of smaller issues<a href=#asterisk>*</a>, but 1517given that I gave an entire talk at Ohio LinuxFest in 2013 1518(<a href=http://landley.net/talks/ohio-2013.txt>outline</a>, 1519<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 1520my projects, that one bugs me.</p> 1521 1522<h3><b>New stuff this release</b></h3> 1523 1524<p>There's a new android menu in menuconfig, and rather a lot of Linux 1525Security Module support (Smack for Tizen from Xavier Roche and José Bollo, 1526and SELinux for Android from Elliott Hughes; see 1527the Security Blanket menu under global settings in menuconfig) has 1528trickled in, although there's still more to come.</p> 1529 1530<p><b>New commands:</b> Added reset, nproc, ionice, and iorenice. 1531Elliott Hughes contributed xxd, runcon, 1532restorecon, load_policy, getenforce, setenforce, getprop, and setprop. 1533Promoted shred, nsenter, and hwclock.</p> 1534 1535<p>You can once again build catv now the flag infrastructure's been updated to 1536let it coexist with cat -v. 1537And on a long plane flight I wrote 1538hexedit, an interactive hex editor that implements the start of 1539cursor control infrastructure (for eventual use by less and vi and shell 1540command history and so on).</p> 1541 1542<p><b>New options:</b> Added sed -E as a BSD-compatible synonym for -r. 1543Upgraded oneit with -r (restart), -3 (send exiting PID values to child), 1544and signal handling. Added -v option to timeout, -m to mknod, -u to shred, 1545-t to dmesg, and -123 to head and tail. Added implicit "." to grep -r without 1546any files to work on. Hyejin Kim requested prefix support for truncate -s. 1547Greg Hackman added -inum to find. 1548Jan Cybulski added the smack side of ls -Z support. Various patches also 1549added -Z to mkdir, mknod, and mkfifo. 1550Basic cp --preserve support went in, but not yet the xattr/LSM parts.</p> 1551 1552<p>The toybox command now has a --version option, 1553which uses "git describe" if available.</p> 1554 1555<p><b>Build infrastructure:</b> 1556The "make change" target now saves the output of each failed standalone 1557command build in a .bad file, and "make defconfig" is quieter now.</p> 1558 1559<p>Paul Barker submitted a large patch changing command install paths so 1560"toybox can be installed alongside busybox without confusing 1561update-alternatives". (There's some argument over 1562what the right paths should be, and I'm waiting for 1563people to tell me what else needs fixing because I have no idea. I've 1564been symlinking /bin to /usr/bin since 2002 1565<a href=http://landley.net/writing/hackermonthly-issue022-pg33.pdf>for 1566historical reasons</a>.)</p> 1567 1568<p><b>Docs:</b> The repository link now goes to github, with another link 1569to the commit rss feed.</p> 1570 1571<p>Elliott Hughes updated the Android section of the roadmap 1572(and he would know). Redid bits of scripts/mkstatus.py to make updating 1573status.html easier, and the README is larger.</p> 1574 1575<p>More description of option parsing in code.html, which now describes the 1576FLAG_x macros, switching flag macro sets with FOR_newcommand, how 1577configuration zeroes flag macros and using FORCE_FLAGS to suppress the 1578zeroing of options shared between commands. Also added description of ";" 1579to make --longopts take an optional =value part, and more about TOYBOX_DEBUG 1580to check NEWTOY() option strings (otherwise a bad option string makes 1581lib/args.c obviously segfault, but doesn't explain why).</p> 1582 1583<p>Added a "Why 0BSD?" section to license.html when submitting zero clause bsd 1584to SPDX (according to the pending license spreadsheet, it's been approved for 1585SPDX 2.2).</p> 1586 1587<p>The old list of commands needing cleanup but not in pending was 1588removed from toys/pending/README and instead the issues were added 1589as TODO comments in the individual commands.</p> 1590 1591<p><b>Bugfixes:</b> 1592Fixed mount -a segfaulting without -O (reported by Janus Troelsen), 1593and made it try a "become rw" ioctl() on the block device before falling 1594back to mounting read only (because Android expects that). 1595Fixed printf -- and printf ---. Lots of tweaks to ls -l spacing with 1596different options. Make touch -d and -t actually set time when you don't 1597specify nanoseconds. 1598Fixed a subtle bug where recursive calls (toybox commands that run other 1599toybox commands) weren't resetting all their state. (This manifested as 1600a "no }" error from "find | xargs sed", but could cause other problems.) 1601And David Halls reported another sed bug trying to compile libiconv (which 1602left extra \ at the start of lines in a generated shell script, breaking 1603the build). Output an error message for "cat /mnt".</p> 1604 1605<p>Kylie McClain reported that mktemp broke when $TMPDIR was set to an empty 1606string (which is not the same as unset), that install/find didn't support 1607numeric uid/gids, and that sort -z affects both input and output. 1608Isabella Parakiss fixed a printf.c bug. 1609David Halls fixed bugs in install -D and find -exec. Samuel Holland 1610fixed unshare -r. Hyejin Kim fixed makedevs with a count of 1, fold -w 1611range checking, an error path in scripts/mkflags.c, added -i to dhcpd, 1612and stopped su from prompting the root user for the new user's password. 1613Jan Cybulski spotted wrong indentation when combining ls -s and -i with -C and 1614-x. José Bollo fixed stat %G. Sameer Pradhan fixed a bug in mkfifo -Z.</p> 1615 1616<p>Elliott Hughes asked for a default SIGPIPE handler to disable 1617the signal handler bionic's dynamic loader installs (yes really). Still not 1618100% sure what the correct behavior is there. (Posix is 1619(<a href=http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.standards.posix.austin.general/10915>actively unhelpful</a>, but at least they're taking 1620<a href=http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=789#c1976>years to 1621make up their mind</a>. Elliott also sent patches to fix a typo in 1622useradd.test, add missing arguments to error_exit() calls and clean up 1623printf() format strings, fix an off by one error in human_readable(), 1624fix dmesg -c error reporting, fix a segfault in comma_scan where the option 1625was the last item in optlist (triggered by mount -o ro,remount), fix 1626hwclock -w, made ifconfig print lowercase MAC addresses (it was bothering 1627him), and make terminal_size() read the right environment variable 1628(LINES, not ROWS). And he suggested the test suite notice high command exit 1629values (corresponding to segfault or other signals).</p> 1630 1631<p>People are apparently using toys/pending commands, despite the police tape 1632and flashing lights, so added louder warnings to toys/pending/README. 1633Elliott Hughes fixed various problems with tar, dd, more, and top. 1634Hyejin Kim cleaned up syslogd and dumpleases. Isaac Dunham added hotplug 1635support to mdev. Yeongdeok Suh added RFC-3315 ipv6 support to dhcpd.</p> 1636 1637<p>I rewrote ps.c from scratch (in pending), but it's not ready for real use 1638yet.</p> 1639 1640<p><b>Portability:</b> 1641On the portability front Bernhard Rosenkranzer fixed a problem where the 1642menuconfig code wouldn't compile in C99 mode. (This led to me documenting 1643the craptacular nature of kconfig in a README, and the plan to replace it 1644sometime before 1.0.) Some extra flags to shut up overzealous llvm warnings 1645were added (and have to be probed for because gcc complains about 1646arguments it doesn't recognize even when they switch stuff _off_ using 1647a standard syntax). Don't depend on malloc(0) to return non-null in ls. 1648David Halls fixed some mac/ios portability issues, 1649implying somebody's built at least part of toybox on a mac.</p> 1650 1651<p>Added basename_r() to lib/lib.c because the posix semantics for basename() 1652are stupid but what the gnu guys did to it was appalling. 1653Turns out bionic already had a basename_r(), but posix still doesn't. 1654Fixed it up in portability.h, but this 1655could break more stuff in future. (Correct fix is to lobby posix to add it, 1656which would probably take about 15 years...)</p> 1657 1658<p><b>Infrastructure:</b> 1659The build now checks $LDFLAGS for linker-only flags, and allows the strip 1660command to fail (binflt toolchains provide a strip that doesn't work). 1661Since time.c uses floating point, added TOYBOX_FLOAT dependency in config.</p> 1662 1663<p>There's a lib/lsm.h defining varous inline functions for linux 1664security modules stuff, if (lsm_enabled()) should turn into a compile-time 1665constant 0 and let code drop out when TOYBOX_LSM_NONE selected, but 1666testing against CFG_TOYBOX_LSM_NONE or derived symbols is still useful 1667becuase when it _is_ enabled the probe turns into a system call you 1668don't want to repeat too much.</p> 1669 1670<p>Switched a bunch of commands from signal() to xsignal(). Factored out 1671xgetgrnamid() and xgetpwnamid() into xwrap.c. Make time.c depend on 1672TOYBOX_FLOAT (since it always uses float so shouldn't be available on 1673build targets without even software float). Added readfileat() to lib/lib.c.</p> 1674 1675<p>The dirtree infrastructure now passes in full flags for the old symlink 1676field, and the new DIRTREE_SHUTUP flag disables warnings if a file vanishes 1677out from under you during traverse. New dirtree_start() wrapper to 1678create dirtree root with only two arguments.</p> 1679 1680<p>The not-curses infrastructure introduced by hexedit mostly moved to 1681lib/interestingtimes.c.</p> 1682 1683<a name="asterisk" /> 1684<a href="#asterisk_back" />Asterisk:</a> such when 1685Tim contacted me (my blog says a couple days before nov 13, 2011, I.E. 168611/11/11 not some specific day 2 months later) to ask if I wanted to work 1687on a new project he was proposing called 1688<a href=http://www.elinux.org/Busybox_replacement_project>BentoBox</a> 1689(because I used to do busybox, he'd forgotten toybox existed 1690until I brought it up). And don't ask me what "focuses not on compatibility 1691with its GNU counterparts" means when CP_MORE adds 7 non-posix options 1692and toys/other has 84 commands in neither posix nor LSB. I think they're 1693struggling to explain the difference having dismissed "licensing" as being 1694the reason it started up again after a long hiatus? The reason I don't think 1695GNU is special is there are a half-dozen other independent 1696implementations of the same unix command tools out there (AT&T, 1697BSD, Coherent, Minix, plan 9, busybox, toybox, and several more analyzed in 1698the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a>, and that's ignoring the implementations 1699written for DOS or in assembly over the years). But I do care what 1700Linux From Scratch expects, and if it's 1701<a href=http://archive.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-museum/7.6/LFS-BOOK-7.6-NOCHUNKS.html#ch-tools-gcc-pass1>calling mv -v</a> 1702then I impelement mv -v 1703even if <a href=http://landley.net/toybox/roadmap.html>posix hasn't got 1704it</a>. And I don't know why "gnu counterparts" would describe this when 1705util-linux isn't a gnu package, nor are info-zip, e2fsprogs, kmod, less, 1706procps, shadow, sysklogd, vim, zlib, sudo, dhcpcd...</p> 1707 1708<a name="05-04-2015" /><a href="#05-04-2015"><hr><h2><b>April 5, 2015</b></h2></a> 1709<p>Since <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox/>android</a> and 1710<a href=https://git.tizen.org/cgit/platform/upstream/toybox.git>tizen</a> 1711and <a href=https://github.com/kraj/meta-musl/tree/master/recipes-core/toybox>openembedded</a> 1712and <a href=https://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/toybox>gentoo</a> 1713and so on have all been using Georgi Chorbadzhiyski's git mirror rather 1714than the mercurial repository, I bit the bullet and switched the project's repo 1715<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox>to git</a>. Georgi's 1716<a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>mirror</a> is now pulling from that.</p> 1717 1718<a name="25-02-2015" /><a href="#25-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 25, 2015</b></h2></a> 1719<blockquote><p>"A common mistake that people make when trying to design 1720something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of 1721complete fools."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1722 1723<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.5.2</a> 1724(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1702>commit 1702</a>) is out.</p> 1725 1726<p>New promoted commands: sed (finally fixed enough it builds Linux From 1727Scratch), printf (cleaned up and promoted), shred and 1728base64 (the Tizen guys wanted them), getenforce, setenforce, and chcon (android), 1729mix (promoted with fixes from Isaac Dunham), nsenter (from 1730Andy Lutomirski, merged into unshare).</p> 1731 1732<p>Elliott Hughes submited a bunch of patches to support Android (to 1733both toybox and Bionic libc, which he maintains). On toybox's end this 1734involved a lot of fixups to portability.[ch] and fixes to over a dozen 1735commands, plus several new ones. Other portability fixes included working 1736with buildroot's uclibc fork and building for nommu targets.</p> 1737 1738<p>The new "make change" target builds each toybox command as a standalone 1739binary. Rather a lot of commands that didn't build by themselves (mv depending 1740on cp and so on) were hit with a large rock until they built standalone. 1741This involved rewriting bits of option parsing, more elaborate dependency 1742generation, making each command have its own config 1743symbol and main() function (even when it's just a wrapper calling another 1744command's main()), and so on. Also, some commands can't be built standalone 1745at a conceptual level: "help" describes other enabled commands and "sh" 1746has a number of bulitin commands (cd, exit, set) that require the 1747multiplexer infrastructure, so "make change" filters them out.</p> 1748 1749<p>The mailing list's web archive is still screwed up. Dreamhost has 1750been trying to fix it since approximately September. There are 1751<a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>two</a> 1752<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>other</a> less broken 1753archives, but neither has quite the same UI as mailman.</p> 1754 1755<h3>Bugfixes and tweaks</h3> 1756 1757<p>Cynt Rynt sent in tests for ifconfig, 1758Robert Thompson taught factor to accept whitespace separated arguments, 1759Hyejin Kim pointed out that some of mktemp's longopts were attached to 1760the wrong short options, 1761Luis Felipe Strano Moraes fixed a wrong free() call in bootchartd in pending. 1762Patches from Ashwini Sharma to make "df /dev/node" work, prevent du from 1763looping endlessly following symlinks, and to make expr.c 1764(in pending) understand == and regex matches. (Speaking of expr, it gets 1765priority groupings wrong but the bug was actually in the posix spec's 1766HTML conversion. They fixed the posix spec upstream for us. Still need 1767to fix the expr code, but it's in pending for a reason...)</p> 1768 1769<p>Some commands grew new option flags, such as cp --remove-destination 1770and touch -h.</p> 1771 1772<p>The parallel build has better error reporting now. When toybox needs to 1773re-exec itself to regain suid root permissions and hasn't got the suid bit, 1774it now gives the right error message ("not root" instead of "no such command"). 1775 1776<p>Added a test to "mount" to not mount the same device/directory combination 1777over itself (the OS catches this for block devices, but not for tmpfs). 1778Make blkid distinguish ext3 from ext4. Added catv back into cat (because 1779the Android guys wanted it, and they have historical usage on their side, 1780so...). Handle nanoseconds in touch.</p> 1781 1782<p>Fixed a segfault when CP_MORE was disabled (the resulting option flag list 1783no longer defined -d but still had it in option groups at the end). 1784Workaround for glibc redefining dirname() and basename() to random non-posix 1785semantics because gnu. (They could have created dirname_r() but didn't want 1786to.)</p> 1787 1788<p>Fix an ifconfig test that was preventing assigning an ipv4 address to 1789interface aliases. Several cleanup passes on hwclock but not quite 1790promoted out of pending yet.<p> 1791 1792<p>Fixed a wrong error message in rm (if you had a chmod 000 directory and 1793did rm -r on it without -f, after the prompt it would complain it was a 1794directory, which was not the problem).</p> 1795 1796<p>The gzip compression code now does "store only" output to stdout, for 1797what that's worth.</p> 1798 1799<p>Cleanup mountpoint and expand, and remove them from toys/pending/README 1800(a list of commands that predate the toys/pending directory but needed 1801another pass).</p> 1802 1803<h3>Library and infrastructure:</h3> 1804 1805<p>Reworked the option parsing infrastructure so more commands build 1806standalone (via scripts/single.sh or "make change"). The option flag bit 1807values are no longer packed, it leaves spaces where currently disabled 1808flags go, and you can #define FORCE_FLAGS so disabled flags aren't zeroed. 1809This allows multiple commands to more easily share infrastructure, even if 1810your current flag context is for a disabled command (switched off in config), 1811you can force them to stay on and as long as the flags read the same right 1812to left they'll have the same values.</p> 1813 1814<p>We've started removing use of strncpy() because it's a hugely broken 1815standard C function: the length is the maximum length to _append_, not 1816the size of the destination buffer. It memsets the remaining space it didn't 1817copy ala "memset(dest+strlen(dest), 0, len);" so 1818if you think len is the size of dest you're guaranteed to stomp memory off the 1819end). And if it runs out of space it won't null terminate because reasons. 1820(Meanwhile sprintf("%*s", len, str) is counting wide characters in your current 1821locale, so if you set a locale other than "C" it will also go past your 1822allocated buffer size. Whoever is maintining the C library standards is really 1823bad at strings.) 1824Instead we have xstrncat() which will error_exit() if src+dest+1 doesn't 1825fit in the buffer. (Because randomly truncating input data isn't necessarily 1826an improvement.) And there's always xmprintf().</p> 1827 1828<p>Similarly, strtol() doesn't return an error indicator on overflow, 1829you have to clear and then check errno. So new xstrtol() that cares 1830about overflow.</p> 1831 1832<p>The bionic and musl guys agree faccessat(AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) is not 1833supported, so stop using it.</p> 1834 1835<p>Fixed toy_exec() to detect when argc is in optargs, so we don't 1836need a separate xexec_optargs().</p> 1837 1838<a name="18-02-2015" /><a href="#18-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 18, 2015</b></h2></a> 1839<p>Dreamhost continues to be unable to make mailing list archives work, so 1840here's <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>another 1841list archive</a> with a less awkward interface than gmane.</p> 1842 1843<p>(Neither gives you the convenient historical monthly views of mailman, 1844but I still have hopes dreamhost will someday figure out what they're doing 1845wrong. They've only been trying since October. Last month they did a 1846<a href=http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2015/01/14/discussion-list-hardware-maintenance/>hardware upgrade to fix a software problem</a>, and the stale 1847data loads much faster now, so that's something.)</p> 1848 1849<p>Update (Feb 19): the archive started updating again, by discarding 1850all the pending data. So there are now _two_ giant holes in Dreamhost's 1851web archive, from Dec 15-Jan 3, and then another hole from Jan 16-Feb 18. 1852The relevant messages are in both of the other archives. Here's hoping 1853the chronic archive constipation problem won't happen a sixth time.</p> 1854 1855<a name="30-12-2014" /><a href="#30-12-2014"><hr><h2><b>December 30, 2014</b></h2></a> 1856<p>Due to Dreamhost's <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>ongoing</a> 1857<a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>inability</a> to make mailman 1858work reliably, I've added a link to a backup web archive at 1859<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>gmane</a> to the nav bar 1860on the left.</p> 1861 1862<p>You still subscribe to the list through 1863<a href=http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net>the first link</a>.</p> 1864 1865<p>Update (January 27, 2015): they're <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/558428839462703104>still working on it</a>.</p> 1866 1867<a name="19-11-2014" /><a href="#19-11-2014"><hr><h2><b>November 19, 2014</b></h2></a> 1868 1869<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> 1870 1871<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.1</a> 1872(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1566>commit 1566</a>) is out.</p> 1873 1874<p>It's an interim release, mostly bugfixes. There are several new commands, 1875but they're all in pending.</p> 1876 1877<h3>Development</h3> 1878 1879<p>Finally implemented sed, which is still in pending because although 1880it's feature complete according to posix, and even passes the parts of 1881Busybox's sed test suite that aren't explicitly testing for gnu bugs we 1882don't want to copy, it's not yet good enough to build Linux From Scratch. 1883(The ./configure stages use very long sed scripts. 20 commits worth of 1884implementation and debugging, just under 1000 lines of code, and there's 1885still more to do. We're definitely up to some of the "fiddly" commands now. 1886Did you know "echo hello | sed p - -" segfaults gnu sed in Ubuntu 12.04? 1887Yeah...)</p> 1888 1889<p>Talked with the Tizen developers to follow up on their desire to 1890make toybox a part of the base Tizen system, and got a list of commands 1891to add to the roadmap. The tizen todo list is:</p> 1892 1893<blockquote><p> 1894wget, sha256*, gzip, gunzip, bunzip2, rsync, zdiff*, 1895less, ar, arch, base64, csplit, dir, fmt, join, 1896nproc, shred, shuf, stdbuf, stty, test, tr, unexpand, 1897users, vdir, diff3, sdiff, dosfsck (fsck.vfat), awk, fdisk 1898</p></blockquote> 1899 1900<p>(Most of which was already on the todo list, but it helps prioritize.)</p> 1901 1902<p>Fixed md5sum and sha1sum on big endian systems (reported by James McMechan). 1903Andy Lutomirski fixed unshare's help text and option parsing, 1904and submitted nsenter (a tool to use setns(2)) to pending. 1905Isaac Dunham implemented acpi -ctV options, and spotted the bug that ls -d 1906was inappropraitely following command line symlinks without -H or -L (it 1907should act like ls -l does), and ls -F handles symlinks wrong too. 1908Lukasz Szpakowski sent in two bugfixes to tail.c. Cynt Rynt spotted an 1909unnecessary assignment in lib/password.c.</p> 1910 1911<p>Ashwini Sharma's team was as busy as usual, submitting tr, crontab, and 1912ipcrm, and hwclock to pending, more features to the pending ip.c, and a 1913pile of bugfixes (to chgrp, killall, ifconfig, insmod, 1914losetup, comm, cp, id, xwrap, netcat, modprobe, nohup...) mostly found by 1915static analysis. (These fixes are mostly to seldom-used codepaths like the 1916TOYBOX_FREE config option, but test coverage is always appreciated.) Ashwini 1917also suggested upgrading ln -f to leave the original target alone if link 1918creation fails, and reported that mv -f and -i weren't implemented (now fixed).</p> 1919 1920<p>New config option: TOYBOX_NORECURSE prevents xexec() from making internal 1921function calls (for nommu systems with a finite stack).</p> 1922 1923<p>The "toybox" multiplexer command no longer adds a trailing space to each 1924line of command names, so things like "./toybox | tr ' \n' '|'" to create 1925a grep pattern snippet are easier to do. (Why you'd want to is your business, 1926but the output is tidier now.)</p> 1927 1928<h3>Infrastructure</h3> 1929 1930<p>Isaac Dunham added Android support to portability.h, including compile 1931probes for functions missing from bionic-libc, and annotated the commands that 1932use those functions. We haven't really tested building against bionic, 1933but in theory it's possible now.</p> 1934 1935<p>Running the test suite now color codes the PASS/SKIP/FAIL notifications 1936if output is to a tty. (And in case you missed it last time, VERBOSE=fail 1937to stop at the first failure is really useful.)</p> 1938 1939<p>In loopfiles_rw() use O_CLOEXEC instead of O_RDONLY to request the loop 1940function close filehandles for us. (Otherwise the callback function must 1941close each supplied filehandle itself.)</p> 1942 1943<p>The printf-style escape parsing ("\n" and friends) got factored out into 1944a new unescape() function.</p> 1945 1946<a name="02-10-2014" /><a href="#02-10-2014"><hr><h2><b>October 2, 2014</b></h2></a> 1947<blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. 1948The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss... 1949Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the 1950difficulties." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.<p></blockquote> 1951 1952<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a> 1953(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p> 1954 1955<h3>New commands</h3> 1956 1957<p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands 1958(cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p> 1959 1960<p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now 1961ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth 1962instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving 1963looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to 1964cut, touch, free, and id.</p> 1965 1966<p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini 1967Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded 1968fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code. 1969Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p> 1970 1971<h3>Build infrastructure</h3> 1972 1973<p><b>Parallel builds</b></p> 1974 1975<p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of 1976processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.) 1977Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain 1978about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now 1979gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p> 1980 1981<p><b>Standalone builds</b></p> 1982 1983<p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to 1984build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file 1985selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro 1986for the command. It enables each command's 1987sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build 1988full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when 1989the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro 1990now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY 1991without the NEWTOY</p> 1992 1993<p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that 1994aren't building standalone yet are:</p> 1995 1996<blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos, 1997whoami</p></blockquote> 1998 1999<p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY() 2000entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries
2001that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure 2002is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command 2003is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the 2004code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible 2005to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting 2006design goals in the two contexts.)</p> 2007 2008<p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual 2009commands. 2010 2011<p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p> 2012 2013<p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh 2014containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current 2015configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an 2016exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite 2017got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p> 2018 2019<h3>Internals</h3> 2020 2021<p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking 2022filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now 2023done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added 2024to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now 2025requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false). 2026Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various 2027pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can 2028use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode. 2029Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether 2030we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p> 2031 2032<p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges 2033(which happens when you suid something _other_ than root). 2034The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the 2035command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled), 2036toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse 2037internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth), 2038always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when 2039we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes, 2040dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in 2041error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an 2042option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments 2043saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched 2044off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio. 2045Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall 2046with no arguments (segfaulted).</p> 2047 2048<p><b>Portability</b></p> 2049 2050<p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx 2051to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl 2052maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed 2053instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section 2054to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your 2055build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do 2056a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make 2057it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns 2058requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch 2059to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current 2060musl source control.)</p> 2061 2062<p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have 2063another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p> 2064 2065<p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p> 2066 2067<p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small 2068allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing 2069"$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic 2070is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux 2071filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters 2072we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd), 2073newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in 2074filesystem).</p> 2075 2076<h3>Documentation</h3> 2077 2078<p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html 2079documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently 2080(it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p> 2081 2082<p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup 2083before the pending directory was added.</p> 2084 2085<h3>Test Suite</h3> 2086 2087<p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the 2088testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p> 2089 2090<p>Johan Bergström requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to 2091stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu 2092sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p> 2093 2094<p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat, 2095and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p> 2096 2097<a name="07-07-2014" /><a href="#07-07-2014"><hr><h2><b>July 7, 2014</b></h2></a> 2098<blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: 2099most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many 2100solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely 2101concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd 2102because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were 2103unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2104 2105<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> 2106 2107<p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include: 2108lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs, 2109killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han, 2110sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh, 2111host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p> 2112 2113<p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending): 2114sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5, 2115fallocate, and nbd-client.</p> 2116 2117<p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps, 2118bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd, 2119login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's 2120still more to do on all of those.)</p> 2121 2122<p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against 2123musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't 2124support that target yet.)</p> 2125 2126<p><b>Documentation:</b></p> 2127 2128<p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with 2129a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the 2130"coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show 2131stopper for incoming 2132contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them 2133during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes 2134the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p> 2135 2136<p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the 2137full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p> 2138 2139<p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is 2140a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more 2141elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option 2142parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p> 2143 2144<p><b>Fixes</b>:</p> 2145 2146<p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default 2147output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported 2148bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init() 2149was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound) 2150had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be 2151there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at 2152the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test 2153in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return 2154success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and 2155ferror() from xprintf().</p> 2156 2157<p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff 2158implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some 2159diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from 2160a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops 2161at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set, 2162which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of 2163chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p> 2164 2165<p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final 2166build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of 2167libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p> 2168 2169<p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes, 2170so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities. 2171So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the 2172setup code to setlocale().</p> 2173 2174<p><b>Upgrades:</b></p> 2175 2176<p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it 2177to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also 2178added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database 2179parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p> 2180 2181<p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making 2182it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum 2183for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other 2184implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p> 2185 2186<p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname), 2187the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get 2188a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p> 2189 2190<p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP 2191command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p> 2192 2193<p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always 2194build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p> 2195 2196<p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so 2197we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0 2198filename" actually works again.</p> 2199 2200<p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd, 2201and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill, 2202groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still 2203working to fix them.</p> 2204 2205<p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a 2206dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new 2207generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte 2208to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's 2209initialized to in toy_init).</p> 2210 2211<p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and 2212use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro 2213contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs 2214decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion 2215bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you 2216cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the 2217first one, the build break is now more informative).</p> 2218 2219<a name="20-04-2014" /><a href="#20-04-2014"><hr><h2><b>April 20, 2014</b></h2></a> 2220<blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer 2221which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks 2222had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as 2223far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to 2224turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2225 2226<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on 2227<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And 2228about time too.</p> 2229 2230<p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h, 2231that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text 2232from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines. 2233There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p> 2234 2235<p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the 2236way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the 2237<a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk, 2238Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p> 2239 2240<p><b>In pending:</b> 2241Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more, 2242groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added 2243ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty. 2244Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold. 2245I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in 2246compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side) 2247and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p> 2248 2249<p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot, 2250cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus 2251in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some 2252work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations 2253documented what their output actually meant).</p> 2254 2255<p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to 2256handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the 2257fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h 2258options (all commands, html output). 2259Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually 2260set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross 2261compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween 2262sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code. 2263Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options 2264to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and 2265allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded 2266tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after 2267that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting. 2268Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of 2269pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified 2270find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on 2271the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions 2272now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with 2273aliasing.</p> 2274 2275<p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you 2276can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same 2277.c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the 2278bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example. 2279i 2280<p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers 2281not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h 2282was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc 2283configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p> 2284 2285<p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig 2286build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily 2287the absolute latest build environment.)</p> 2288 2289<p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid(). 2290xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd 2291and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command, 2292get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and 2293xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into 2294bzcat.c.</p> 2295 2296<p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the 2297help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output. 2298The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about 2299#including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The 2300<a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading 2301of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for 2302good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion 2303at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p> 2304 2305<a name="18-11-2013" /><a href="#18-11-2013"><hr><h2><b>November 18, 2013</b></h2></a> 2306<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." - 2307The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2308 2309<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.7.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.7</a> is based on 2310<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p> 2311 2312<p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted 2313reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from 2314pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some 2315cleanup.</p> 2316 2317<p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going 2318into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted 2319dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and 2320an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p> 2321 2322<p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer 2323added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem. 2324William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input 2325(the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug 2326where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault). 2327I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using 2328the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a 2329synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with 2330$CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted 2331a typo in the web page.</p> 2332 2333<p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from 2334bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by 2335--longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal 2336querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a 2337debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply). 2338The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and 2339micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite 2340now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p> 2341 2342<a name="17-09-2013" /><a href="#17-09-2013"><hr><h2><b>September 17, 2013</b></h2></a> 2343<blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number." 2344Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway 2345station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function, 2346and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 2347</blockquote> 2348 2349<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on 2350<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p> 2351 2352<p>This release adds 2353several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han 2354submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and 2355a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted 2356acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p> 2357 2358<p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker). 2359The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah" 2360instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in. 2361Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain 2362other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who 2363heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID 2364namespace support.</p> 2365 2366<h3>Pending</h3> 2367 2368<p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should 2369probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd, 2370dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from 2371Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet), 2372syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar, 2373test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E. 2374M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p> 2375 2376<p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't 2377ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig 2378and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up 2379logger and syslogd...</p> 2380 2381<p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory, 2382but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du, 2383expand, and touch.</p> 2384 2385<h3>Infrastructure</h3> 2386 2387<p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the 2388multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes, 2389OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a 2390command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If 2391you're curious, you can do:</p> 2392 2393<blockquote><pre> 2394make defconfig 2395make 2396mkdir singles 2397for i in $(./toybox) 2398do 2399 echo $i 2400 PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break 2401done 2402</pre> 2403<p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p> 2404</blockquote> 2405 2406<p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this 2407time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p> 2408 2409<p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions 2410not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains 2411functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit). 2412This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p> 2413 2414<p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude 2415logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts 2416should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ; 2417option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E. 2418--color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p> 2419 2420<p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf 2421does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it 2422for us".</p> 2423 2424<p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid(). 2425It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite 2426so much anymore.</p> 2427 2428<p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly 2429linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are 2430using it now.</p> 2431 2432<p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag 2433(-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables) 2434that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept 2435into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler, 2436"-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p> 2437 2438<h3>Bugfixes</h3> 2439 2440<p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to 2441finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f 2442someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once). 2443Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p> 2444 2445<p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that 2446python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks 2447for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer 2448then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p> 2449 2450<p>Ashwini Sharma 2451pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some 2452configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p> 2453 2454<p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and 2455a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p> 2456 2457<p>The new function xexec_optargs() 2458replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs 2459during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p> 2460 2461<p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which 2462didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup 2463between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh 2464command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p> 2465 2466<p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't 2467delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm 2468should now be fixed.</p> 2469 2470<p> 2471<a name="26-07-2013" /><a href="#26-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 26, 2013</b></h2></a> 2472<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git 2473mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the 2474mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches 2475against it and post them to the list.</p> 2476 2477<a name="02-07-2013" /><a href="#02-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 2, 2013</b></h2></a> 2478<blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You 2479should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people 2480like you." - 2481The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2482 2483<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on 2484<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds 2485uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by 2486default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and 2487enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups". 2488Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv". 2489</p> 2490 2491<p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and 2492each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help" 2493and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p> 2494 2495<p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client, 2496logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup. 2497Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up. 2498(It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p> 2499 2500<p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach 2501more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The 2502<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis 2503of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p> 2504 2505<p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected, 2506condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught 2507-l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices. 2508Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking), 2509and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no 2510corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work). 2511Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham 2512fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output 2513field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means 2514to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda 2515moved file permission display code to lib so ls and 2516stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the 2517last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it 2518(ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user). 2519</p> 2520 2521<p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global 2522variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc 2523debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and 2524that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of 2525just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking 2526against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes 2527for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes 2528various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical 2529(breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names). 2530 2531<p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build 2532system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The 2533release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control. 2534Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p> 2535</p> 2536 2537<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 2538BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first 2539paragraph now says:</p> 2540 2541<blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this 2542software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote> 2543 2544<p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this 2545permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all 2546copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects 2547that 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 2548both 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 2549less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate 2550the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p> 2551 2552<p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more 2553or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it 2554BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p> 2555 2556<a name="21-03-2013" /><a href="#21-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 21, 2013</b></h2></a> 2557<p>Video of my ELC talk 2558"<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>" 2559is up on youtube. Related materials include the 2560<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an 2561<a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p> 2562 2563<p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about 2564the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p> 2565 2566<ul> 2567<li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li> 2568 <ul> 2569 <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li> 2570 <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li> 2571 </ul> 2572<li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li> 2573 <ul> 2574 <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li> 2575 </ul> 2576<li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li> 2577<li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li> 2578<li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li> 2579 <ul> 2580 <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li> 2581 <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li> 2582 <ul> 2583 <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li> 2584 <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li> 2585 </ul> 2586 </ul> 2587</ul> 2588</span> 2589 2590 2591<a name="14-03-2013" /><a href="#14-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 14, 2013</b></h2></a> 2592<blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." - 2593The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2594 2595<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on 2596<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding 2597the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p> 2598 2599<p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes 2600getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds. 2601"id -Gn root" should now print root's groups 2602instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under 2603Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you 2604can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p> 2605 2606<p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending". 2607Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig. 2608Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig 2609should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p> 2610 2611<p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries 2612(klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p> 2613 2614<a name="18-01-2013" /><a href="#18-01-2013"><hr><h2><b>January 18, 2013</b></h2></a> 2615<blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2616 2617<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on 2618<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There 2619are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the 2620<a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p> 2621 2622<p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s 2623and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to 2624kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite. 2625Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p> 2626 2627<p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and 2628readlink commands. The segfault in ls 2629happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the 2630default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an 2631extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing 2632a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath() 2633code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test 2634suite checks for it).</p> 2635 2636<p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the 2637error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's 2638still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error 2639bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That 2640means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right 2641error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.) 2642Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG 2643doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with 2644at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic 2645(and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma). 2646dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree 2647functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using 2648libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means 2649it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p> 2650 2651<p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that 2652disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back 2653to -Os by default now.</p> 2654 2655<a name="15-12-2012" /><a href="#15-12-2012"><hr><h2><b>December 15, 2012</b></h2></a> 2656<blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a 2657thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly 2658go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." 2659</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2660 2661<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on 2662<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is 2663just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal 2664Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's 2665a new stable version.</p> 2666 2667<p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch 2668(from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a 2669bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8 2670support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option. 2671Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof. 2672The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports 2673-fenq.</p> 2674 2675<p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library, 2676and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel 2677features we depend on start to drop out).</p> 2678 2679<p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per 2680level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more 2681than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out, 2682or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an 2683earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README, 2684the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory 2685(so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p> 2686 2687<p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist(). 2688Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with 2689full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to 2690stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing 2691it).</p> 2692 2693<p>The open group broke their website so the 2694<a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008 2695now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with 2696pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while 2697I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p> 2698 2699<p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant 2700because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current 2701implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option 2702to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks, 2703but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024 2704filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p> 2705 2706<a name="13-11-2012" /><a href="#13-11-2012"><hr><h2><b>November 13, 2012</b></h2></a> 2707<blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins." 2708- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2709 2710<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on 2711<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p> 2712 2713<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and 2714Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and 2715md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix, 2716unix2dos).</p> 2717 2718<p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by 2719default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name. 2720Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p> 2721 2722<p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into 2723"posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008, 2724the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig 2725and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on). 2726An android directory is planned (see the updated 2727<a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p> 2728 2729<p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's 2730global block are now automatically generated, commands should 2731#define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that 2732command.</p> 2733 2734<p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and - 2735in them, such as switch_root.</p> 2736 2737<p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of 2738uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers. 2739The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite 2740properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's 2741fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage 2742calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp 2743and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces 2744break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite 2745properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's 2746fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib 2747fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary 2748on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending 2749on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in 2750a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking 2751partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts: 2752this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it 2753wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite 2754some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to 2755successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc 2756versions was added to portability.h.</p> 2757 2758<p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a 2759rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All 2760the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards 2761document, where applicable.</p> 2762 2763<p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into 2764a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p> 2765 2766<p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're 2767back now.</p> 2768</span> 2769 2770<a name="23-07-2012" /><a href="#23-07-2012"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2012</b></h2></a> 2771<blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys 2772out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked 2773out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2774 2775<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on 2776<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p> 2777 2778<p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from 2779the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p> 2780 2781<p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed 2782taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han 2783contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a 2784case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p> 2785 2786<p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the 2787<a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and 2788<a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option 2789to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime), 2790fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the 2791corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding 2792glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing 2793pending output on exit.</p> 2794 2795<a name="25-06-2012" /><a href="#25-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 25, 2012</b></h2></a> 2796<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> 2797 2798<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit 2799<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's 2800mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than 2801x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which 2802now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test 2803suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the 2804musl libc.</p> 2805 2806<p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here 2807it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40 2808pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p> 2809</span> 2810 2811<a name="12-06-2012" /><a href="#12-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 12, 2012</b></h2></a> 2812<blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that 2813he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the 2814wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was 2815muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had 2816always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely 2817the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2818 2819<p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>, 2820so here it is, based 2821on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the 2822statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should 2823actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting 2824that).</p> 2825 2826<p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development 2827doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course. 2828The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which 2829threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit 2830more frequent from here on.</p> 2831 2832<p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory 2833tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that 2834which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p> 2835 2836<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown, 2837chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if 2838you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug 2839on slackware.</p> 2840 2841<p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and 2842mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint, 2843vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups. 2844Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p> 2845 2846<p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell 2847wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove 2848deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and 2849musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got 2850some cleanups and bugfixes.</p> 2851 2852<p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not 2853to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's 2854problematic).</p> 2855 2856<p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now, 2857yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the 2858SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox 2859multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer 2860segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full 2861posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next 2862release.)</p> 2863 2864<p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros 2865for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue 2866is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p> 2867 2868<p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built 2869Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that 2870'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing. 2871(The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted 2872yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before 28731.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p> 2874 2875 2876<a name="03-03-2012" /><a href="#03-03-2012"><hr><h2><b>March 3, 2012</b></h2></a> 2877 2878<blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral 2879without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them. 2880Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking 2881for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p> 2882</p></blockquote> 2883 2884<p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based 2885on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>. This 2886time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt 2887binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p> 2888 2889<p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I 2890have not quite been keeping up.)</p> 2891 2892<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod, 2893insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename. Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln, 2894realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall. Daniel 2895Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests 2896for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp. 2897Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed 2898cross compiling to work more reliably.</p> 2899 2900<p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's 2901code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new 2902code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python 2903bloat-o-meter.)</p> 2904 2905<p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from 2906Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott, 2907more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano 2908Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and 2909optimizations.</p> 2910 2911<p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link, 2912dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months 2913and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p> 2914 2915 2916<a name="12-02-2012" /><a href="#12-02-2012"><hr><h2><b>February 12, 2012</b></h2></a> 2917<blockquote><p> 2918"for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at 2919least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two 2920important respects..."</p> 2921<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 2922 2923<p>Here's the first BSD licensed release, 2924<a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization 2925point than anything particularly useful. 47 commands in a reasonably 2926ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially 2927finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several 2928patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p> 2929 2930<p>More to come...</p> 2931 2932<hr> 2933<a name="15-11-2011" /><a href="#15-11-2011"><hr><h2><b>November 15, 2011</b></h2></a> 2934- Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2 2935clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line 2936implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p> 2937 2938<p>More to come...</p> 2939 2940<hr> 2941 2942<p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p> 2943 2944<!--#include file="footer.html" --> 2945