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="18-10-2019" /><a href="#18-10-2019"><hr><h2><b>October 18, 2019</b></h2></a> 12<blockquote> 13<p>"In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real 14men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri 15were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri." 16</p> <p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 17</blockquote> 18 19<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.2</a> 20(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.2>git commit</a>) 21is finally out (only two months late).</p> 22 23<p>The new commands this time are minor variants of existing ones 24(<b>dnsdomainname</b> is hostname -d, <b>arch</b> is uname -m), but about 251/3 of toysh got implemented in pending, <a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> got merged as a "make root" target (see Build), 26and Android's <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2019-August/010845.html>hermetic build</a> 27work continued resulting in a lot of fixes.</p> 28 29<p>The android-specific <b>getprop</b>, <b>setprop</b>, <b>start</b>, and <b>stop</b> 30commands were removed from toybox because they grew dependencies on android 31libraries, and since toybox tries to avoid mandatory external dependencies 32they moved to another package.</p> 33 34<p><u>Build</u>: 35The new "make root" target builds a simple toybox root filesystem, 36using scripts/mkroot.sh which is a stripped 37down version of the external <a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> 38project merged into toybox. (Alas, at the moment it wants sh and route out 39of pending, which aren't quite load bearing yet.)</p> 40 41<p>The new "scripts/mcm-buildall.sh" convenience script builds cross 42compilers based on gcc+musl multiple targets (arm, x86, mips, m68k, s390, 43microblaze...) 44using <a href=https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>musl-cross-make</a>, 45and a new scripts/cross.sh to easily cross compile for one or more targets 46using the resulting compilers. (This works with "make root", "make 47toybox", and other builds understanding the CROSS_COMPILE environment variable.)</p> 48 49<p>Setting the environment variable ASAN=1 enables the 50llvm address sanitizer. (You may need to 51export ASAN_SYMBOLIZER_PATH on debian to use it, they add the version number to 52the filename in /usr/bin which confuses llvm.)</p> 53 54<p>Patrick Oppenlander fixed make -j (our make is a wrapper around 55scripts/make.sh which was already doing a parallel build, but if you called 56make with -j it wouldn't wait for make.sh to finish and the build broke).</b> 57 58<p>Lots of fixes for the MacOS build.</p> 59 60<p><u>New options</u>: 61We upgraded <b>tar</b> to extract some older tarballs, <b>file</b> added -b and -s 62options and can also recognize older tarballs, 63some xz archives, .otf fonts, perf/simpleperf data files, 64android boot images, and dtb files. Upgraded <b>file</b> to show the device type 65for block and char devices, the target for symlinks, and it says _why_ it can't 66open a file.</p> 67 68<p>Several commands ignore some options rather than erroring on them: 69<b>patch</b> ignores the -f -g# and --no-backup-if-mismatch options 70(all of which we were already doing by default anyway), and <b>xargs</b> 71ignores -P# (which requests parallel execution, maybe add it later but 72single threading works), and Denys Nykula made <b>wget</b> ignore 73--no-check-ceritificate and <b>gzip</b> ignore -n (again, we weren't doing 74either anyway) to satisfy pkgsrc.</p> 75 76<p>William Haddon taught <b>diff</b> and <b>patch</b> to support special characters in path 77names (via quoting) and more timestamp formats. 78Eric Molitor implemented <b>nl</b> -v (with negative and zero starting values), 79and fixed a MacOS compatibility issue in the build scripts. 80Tom Cherry added <b>netcat</b> -U (UNIX domain socket support). 81Denys Nykula taught <b>wget</b> to call ftpget for ftp:// URLs. 82Ethan Sommer added ln -t and rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty. 83Elliott Hughes added <b>grep</b> -R, <b>killall</b> -w, tar --mode, 84 fixed <b>ls</b> -Z and spacing in -lZ and --full-time, 85added <b>xargs</b> --max-args and removed xargs -I (which we never actually 86supported) and tweaked the size calculation to more closely match other 87versions, 88added xargs -o and made -p read from /dev/tty, added <b>blkid</b> -s, SEC_TYPE for ext3, 89msdos, and ntfs, f2fs and ntfs LABEL, fixed vfat/ntfs UUID, and switched 90the endianness for UUID of msdos/ntfs/vfat, simplified the octal mode 91display in <b>lsof</b>, added <b>pidof</b> -x (thus making the default behavior _not_ 92be -x).</p> 93 94<p>When readdir() succeeds but stat() fails, <b>ls</b> now prints "??? ? ? filename" 95entries instead of "cannot access" errors. (Still trying to make ls / on 96android work more gracefully with the SELinux weirdness they added in 9.)</p> 97 98<p>Added %C to <b>stat</b> and made it show device type in its default output, 99<b>cmp</b> now works 100with 1 argument (implicit - as second argument reading from stdin). 101<b>sed</b> added exit codes to the q command (q123), added Q, and fixed a 102bad error message with "!". 103Removed TAIL_SEEK config option (it just always does that now), 104<b>find</b> grew several new options (%Z, -true, -false, and -newerXY), <b>ln</b> added -T. 105The argument to <b>mktmp</b> --tmpdir is now optional.</p> 106 107<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 108The unshare probe bit-rotted so it was impossible to build <b>unshare</b> 109and <b>nsenter</b> on some distros. 110Commit 771e94e2a08 broke toybox's ability to say "unknown command" when 111you pointed a symlink at it that it that didn't correspond to a command, 112pointing a symlink at another symlink 113to make toybox run a command under a name it doesn't recognize 114(ln -s toybox sh; ln -s sh ash) had an off by one error, 115<b>ifconfig</b> no longer error_exits if the "read mac address" ioctl fails (Android N 116and later block that for non-root users to prevent device tracking). 117When the libcrypto library was disabled, md5sum was building commands it 118hasn't got built-in support for yet (like sha3sum) which acted like redundant 119copies of md5sum, 120<b>tar</b> wasn't correctly reading or writing sparse files with a hole at 121the end, and tar tzf blah.tar.xz was calling xz when it meant xzcat, 122<b>xargs</b> would spuriously fail on large memory systems (due to a missing 123"unsigned" in a typecast), 124<b>basename</b> can now remove suffixes starting with a dash, 125<b>cp</b> -r unlinks() an existing symlink before trying to 126recreate the symlink (otherwise cp -r into an existing directory will 127try to follow the existing symlink and create another symlink at its 128destination, failing if a file already exists there, which 129was confusing gentoo's package manager), <b>timeout</b> now produces the 130right exit code when the timed command intercepts the exit signal, 131and <b>hostname</b> -d no longer segfaults on machines with no domain name.</p> 132 133<p>Denys Nykula fixed the <b>ftpget</b> freeze (it was sending REST instead 134of RETR), made <b>mv</b> work with a trailing slash in the source, 135fixed a <b>find</b> segfault, 136and made <b>env</b> always exec rather than recursing to a builtin 137(on the theory #!/usr/bin/env is expected to search the $PATH).</p> 138 139<p>Elliott improved <b>killall</b>'s handling of long filenames, made <b>kill</b> work 140when killall5 is disabled (missing FORCE_FLAGS), fixed error reporting in 141<b>hostname</b>, fixed several things in <b>xargs</b>, 142made <b>printf</b> \c and \0 octal escapes work, fixed a <b>find</b> -name corner 143case (find src/*.c -name file.c) and find dangling symlink behavior, 144made some <b>rm</b> error messages consistent, fixed \x behavior in echo and 145printf, fixed linestack.c's buffer length for utf8 U+XXXX escape printing, 146fixed a race in <b>losetup</b>, fixed <b>grep</b> -F with multiple matches on the same 147line and an -I failure in the existing grep tests, made <b>readlink</b> notice 148when it has more than one argument, and made various 149fixes to <b>modinfo</b>.</p> 150 151<p>Ethan Sommer reported that <b>stat</b> of an suid/sticky file output 5 digits of 152octal stat date instead of 4. 153Rob fixed an unaligned access in <b>grep</b>. Alessio Balsini removed an incorrect 154null termination in <b>losetup</b>. 155Jarno Mäkipää fixed <b>hexedit</b> 156scrolling up and down on older terminals, and fixed <b>ls</b> segfaulting with a broken 157(non-UTF8) locale (didn't expect wcrtomb to return -1). 158Andrew Ilijic made ls put 2 spaces between columns like other implementations 159(which helps when terminals get confused and apply UTF8 combining characters 160to the space after a filename). 161</p> 162 163<p><u>Library</u>: 164Added dlist_lpop() to use a dlist as a stack (it removes the last entry 165instead of the first), and dlist_pop() now works on a dlist_terminate()d list. 166DIRTREE_STATLESS returns entries we couldn't stat() (with a zeroed ->st 167field, and ->again |= 2), but filling in the file type from readdir(). 168Coversions between signal names and numbers now include all the Linux signals, 169not just posix ones. The functions sig_to_num() and num_to_sig() moved into 170lib/portability.h, because MacOS has different signals. 171TOYFLAG_MAYFORK allows commands to run in toysh's process without forking, 172but also makes them accessable from the toybox multiplexer or standalone. 173A MAYFORK command has to clean up after itself (even in error paths) and 174can't discard anything we need to keep (such as closing stdout).</p> 175 176<p>Elliott did a big xbind/xconnect cleanup (adding xbindany and xconnectany), 177taught xregcomp that an empty regex matches the whole line 178(because FreeBSD, and thus MacOS, doesn't already do that), and 179replaced several uses of get_line() (which does single byte reads) 180with getline() (which doesn't).</p> 181 182<p><u>Plumbing</u>: 183"make clean" doesn't produce a screenful of unnecessary output now, 184rm, ln, cp, kill, and netcat use the FLAG() macros now, makedevs uses the new 185GLOBALS naming format, timeout now uses xwaitpid(), and we fixed an 186off by one error in xwaitpid().</p> 187 188<p>Elliott removed a workaround for old NDK versions from getconf and 189moved sort off of get_rawline() (which let us remove it). 190Rob undid some loop unrolling in md5sum/sha1sum (we have libcrypto if you want 191an assembly optimized version instead of an understandable version).</p> 192 193<p>Android ndk-r20 doesn't define the __ANDROID_NDK__ symbol, so we switched 194to using clang's __has_include() (which is an undefined macro and thus a NOP 195resolving to false on gcc).</p> 196 197<p><u>Pending</u>: 198Rob did a lot of work on toysh: continuation support works (it knows when to ask 199for another line of text and when to run what it's got), as do 200nested if/else/elif statements, and while and for loops (supporting "for i" 201and "for i in", but not for ((;;)) yet). 202It parses pipes and redirections but doesn't perform them yet. 203The next big todo chunk is environment variable resolution. 204</p> 205 206<p>Gavin Howard fixed some bugs in bc, such as not returning error when raising 207zero to a negative power. 208Jarno Mäkipää continues to extend vi, adding yank and push, support for tabs, 209rewriting delete, changing the drawing code, etc. Elliott also added several 210fixes and features to vi, 211fixed host to cope with large DNS responses, switched crontab to 212use getline(), did work on man, fixed fixed several things in dd, 213implemented diff --strip-trailing-cr and made diff not need /tmp. 214Mike Bennett added extended attribute support to ip.c's route change.</p> 215 216<p><u>Test suite</u>: The killall and pgrep tests were having occasional 217spurious failures due to a race condition (the test script would fork() 218to call sleep and for just a moment there were two instances of the test 219script, reporting an extra process if killall or pgrep ran then). 220 221<p>Elliott Hughes did a lot of work on the test suite: add kill -l tests, 222make losetup.test notice (and skip) if loopback 223devices area already in use, blkid.test can TEST_HOST e2fsprogs blkid now, 224modinfo.test notices (and skips) if there's no /proc/modules or modules 225directory, ifconfig.test skips if "dummy0 up" fails and disabled the 226pointtopoint tests entirely (the kernel never supported it?), 227truncate.test is less 228confused by SELinux, hostname.test can run some tests as non-root, 229addressed a race condition in killall.test on slow systems, 230made chgrp.test, chown.test, and tar.test handle an empty /etc/passwd or /etc/group 231(we were checking whether they were _there_ but some android devics have 232empty ones), 233fixed a couple things in env.test, extended killall.test to explicitly cover 234long and short names (and not assume the shell is /bin/sh), taught split.test not to rely on bash process substitution, 235added missing TZ=utc to touch.test, fixed cp.test to pass for root 236or with a restrictive umask, and fixed the FAILCOUNT arithmetic to use more portable 237$(()). Elliott also made some tests more flexible (find.test can handle any 238error message about symlink loops, etc), and disabled others (such as du) 239when SELinux is enabled.</p> 240 241<p>Rob taught testcmd not to use the shell builtin for TEST_HOST unless there 242isn't one in the $PATH, work if $PWD has a space in it, 243and make kill.test stop testing the shell builtin 244insead of the command, quieted tests that were producing output 245other than their PASS/FAIL line, and made NOSPACE tests ignore the 246presence/absence of leading/trailing whitespace as well as differences 247in the amount of space.</p> 248 249<p><u>Documentation</u>: 250The <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> got freshened up a bit, with updates 251for android from Elliott. 252In <a href=design.html>the design page</a> the Features section starts with 2534 new paragraphs about the scope of toybox, and a new License section talks 254about 0BSD. 255The "./toybox --help" output now explains how to do install_flat by hand.</p> 256 257<p><u>Sheer pedantry</u>: 258Elliott fixed a double close in loopfiles_lines() so strace doesn't 259have an EBADF in it, and added a missing "static" in lib/net.c.</p> 260 261<a name="21-05-2019" /><a href="#21-05-2019"><hr><h2><b>May 21, 2019</b></h2></a> 262<blockquote> 263<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> 264</blockquote> 265 266<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.1</a> 267(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.1>git commit</a>) 268is out.</p> 269 270<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> 271(meaning Android is building under toybox, which is halfway to Android 272building 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> 273 274<p><u>New commands</u>: Isaac Dunham added <b>mcookie</b>, which is used by 275X11. Elliott Hughes added <b>devmem</b>, which replaces toolbox's "r".</p> 276 277<p><u>Promoted</u>: <b>tar</b>, <b>gunzip</b>, and <b>zcat</b> were cleaned 278up and moved out of pending. 279Tar is a near-rewrite with support for --owner --group and --sparse, 280capable of autodetecting "wget blah.tar.bz2 -O - | tar xv", a --restrict option 281that only allows files to extract into a single subdirectory, and so on.</p> 282 283<p><u>Added to pending</u>: 284Jarno Mäkipää contributed a new <b>vi</b> implementation. Makepost added 285<b>man</b>.</p> 286 287<p><u>Updates</u>: Elliott added <b>find</b> -wholename/-iwholename, -printf, 288and -context, <b>grep</b> --exclude-dir, and <b>echo</b> -E. 289Rob added <b>blkid</b> -U and -L, <b>mount</b> now has UUID= support via blkid -U, 290you can now specify TZ="blah" in the <b>date</b> -d input string (although 291why the double quotes are required is an open question), and <b>sed</b> now 292understands ,+N relative ranges. Makepost added <b>rm</b> -v. 293The human_readable fields in <b>ps</b>/<b>top</b>/<b>iotop</b> now use all 294available space to show more precision, <b>iotop</b> displays swap bandwidth 295properly (it was showing a signed field as unsigned), and 296<b>touch</b> -t and -d autodetect the time format.</p> 297 298<p><u>Cleanups</u>: In pending Rob did some bc cleanup, 299Colin Davidson did some arp cleanup, 300Uros Prestor fixed route argument parsing, and 301in bc Daniel Rosenberg fixed bc_vec_concat()'s allocation and 302Gavin Howard fixed an overflow bug in bc_num_ulong().</p> 303 304<p>Elliott made scan_key() detect cursor keys and such with several more 305terminal types, made more better about directories and non-tty output, 306cleaned up inconsistent uses of ARRAY_LEN(), taught file 307to recognize a c-sky ELF machine, and fixed timezone and daylight 308savings time issues in date and its tests. 309Rob simplified netcat and ping using new lib/net.c infrastructure. 310When run as non-PID 1 (for a chroot) oneit's exit code now indicates 311which signal it's exiting due to. 312Hadrian Węgrzynowski #defined constants for mkpathat. 313Date now uses the current time for unspecified fields (instead of zeroing 314them), and should set the weekday properly. 315Sort's -k2.3,4.5 syntax is now documented and behaves more closely to 316other implementations (silly as that behavior is). 317Significant speedup to sed s/a/b/g on a megabyte long line (it was 318O(n^2) and now it's quite snappy).</p> 319 320<p>Several cases of warning about stdout failing to write were silenced 321because things like piping the output to head means stdout is a special 322case: its output is often discarded and that's fine. And xprintf() 323and friends only checks stdout for errors so it can exit early ("yes | head" 324should not spin endlessly) without actually flushing anything. 325There's an ongoing design debate about line buffering stdin and stdout 326that'll have to be resolved next dev cycle.</p> 327 328<p><u>Bugs</u>: 329Elliott sent in a lot of fixes for building AOSP with toybox: 330support for more date formats, sed substitution of empty capture groups 331and an endless loop with -EPIPE, fixed find -path/-ipath, made loggit() 332only feed LOG_AUTH to syslog when we have a tty, gave grep a bunch 333of --longname synonyms for short options, added getfattr --only-values, 334and timeout --foreground --preserve-status and --signal.</p> 335 336<p>Top got a lot of tweaks: it no longer collates thread's CPU usage into the 337parent thread (in -H mode), hides the cursor in interactive mode, updates the 338display properly in batch mode, and accepts ENTER 339as a synonym for SPACE when refreshing the display. The header lines 340now abbreviate long numbers with units (via human_readable()), 341more reliably spans the terminal width, and says "Thread" instead 342of "Task" when it's showing threads. The task/thread count now adds up 343(understanding more kernel states and treating unknown ones as "sleeping"). 344Top now treats -o "" as an error (previously it displayed an empty screen).</p> 345 346<p>William Djupström pointed out login needs to chown() the tty, and made it 347clear the environment when -p is absent. 348Vidar Holen fixed inverted find -exec exit status. 349Rob made chgrp() stop relying on libc's printf("%s", NULL) printing "(null)" 350because a <a href=https://github.com/varnishcache/varnish-cache/issues/2879>newly added gcc bug</a> turns that into a build break, and 351fixed an outright embarassing xstrndup() bug. 352Liwugang fixed a segfault when stat's format string had a trailing %. 353A missing else in grep meant -x was sometimes ignored.</p> 354 355<p><u>Infrastructure</u>: 356in the build scripts/portability.sh now tests that the compiler it's trying 357to use exists up front. We no longer link against librt because on glibc that's 358pulling in libpthread for some unknown reason.</p> 359 360<p>TOYFLAG_ARGFAIL() lets commands return custom exit values when option parsing 361fails (because AOSP build scripts cared), so timeout --unknown returns 125 362and so on: chroot, diff, cmp, env, grep, nohup, and sort also use it now with 363various values.</p> 364 365<p>New FLAG() macros: FLAG(x) expands to (toys.optflags&FLAG_x) and returns 366zero if the command line argument's bit isn't set and nonzero if it is 367(meaning -x was or wasn't encountered on the command line this time by 368lib/args.c). Lots of commands got converted to use them.</p> 369 370<p>New lib/env.c with reset_env(), xsetenv(), and xunsetenv() which frees 371the old environment variable when it wasn't inherited from exec(). This 372lets long-running loops reset environment variables without memory leaks.</p> 373 374<p>New xnotify() plumbing in lib/portability.c with Linux and Mac versions 375(which should also work on BSD).</p> 376 377<p>New xparsedate() and xvali_date() functions allow date, tar --mtime, and 378touch to understand the same date formats, 379xpopen_both() now knows how to use existing filehandles for the child's 380stdin/stdout, and no longer redirects stderr (which hides errors), 381new nanomove(), nanodiff(), union socksaddr, xrecvwait(), 382and human_readable_long() to show more than 3 digits of output.</p> 383 384<p>Taught xgetaddrinfo() to return a wildcard address for a NULL host, 385xconnbind() sets SO_REUSEADDR by default, 386fileunderdir() returns the abspath to the file now (since we had to work 387it out anyway), and 388xabspath() uses O_PATH now (because Android's SELinux rules got more aggressive).</p> 389 390<p>Several new xsendfile() variants, including sendfile_len() to copy 391a specific amount of data and xsendfile_pad() to append zeroes to the 392output when there isn't enough input.</p> 393 394<p>regexec0() is now using libc's REG_STARTEND supported by every libc out 395there _except_ musl. (It originated in BSD and was adopted by glibc, bionic, 396and uClibc 15 years ago, and is also supported in macosx. Musl's maintainer 397<a href=https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2013/01/15/26>turned down</a> 398the feature request as an invalid use case he didn't think they should 399be trying to do.)</p> 400 401<p><u>Docs</u>: 402the <a href=license.html>license page</a> now has an SPDX identifier, and links to more 403history/context. The actual LICENSE file had its title line removed 404so <a href=https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/pull/643#issuecomment-463746027>github could recognize it</a> as 0BSD. (We're still waiting for 405"<a href=https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/pull/643#issuecomment-464380789>a while</a>" to pass before github actually does, though.)</p> 406 407<p>A new www/doc/mount.txt file describes how mount works under the covers.</p> 408 409<p>Rob consistently misspelled "canonical" and "millisecond", mountpoint 410has a synopsis now, 411Kevin van der Kamp fixed a typo in netstat's help text, and Elliott 412Hughes fixed typos everywhere and made the tense, capitalization, and 413punctuation of help text more consistent.</p> 414 415<p>New paragraph in the code style part of design.html explaining that 416"char* a, b;" is not how C works, and since you wind up with "char *a, b;" 417anyway you might as well say that.</p> 418 419<p>Given dreamhost's tendency to repeatedly delete the mailing list 420archive, the nav bar on the left links to a backup web archive now too.</p> 421 422<p>The FAQ now says why we do time based releases.</p> 423 424<p><u>Testing</u>: Added VERBOSE=nopass to not show passing tests. 425The test suite now does an rm -rf on testdir between each command so 426debris files don't accumulate. 427New skipnot function skips the next test if a command line fails, and 428toyonly function only runs command when we're testing the toybox version 429of command. (This isn't the same as TEST_HOST, the host version could be 430toybox.) 431The find -newer test calls "sleep .1" to avoid intermittently failing with an 432identical timestamp. 433Elliott added the start of a file.test rogues gallery. 434No longer call lsattr in "make tests" because the behavior differs by 435filesystem and it needs fixing somehow.</p> 436 437<a name="08-02-2019" /><a href="#08-02-2019"><hr><h2><b>February 8, 2019</b></h2></a> 438<blockquote> 439<p>"Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified 440Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and 441in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have 442been left blank to save on printing costs."</p> 443<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 444</blockquote> 445 446<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.0</a> 447(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.0>git commit</a>) 448is out.</p> 449 450<p>Toybox now builds on MacOS and FreeBSD, thanks to the efforts of Elliott 451Hughes and Ed Maste respectively. Use the "make macos_defconfig" and "make 452freebsd_defconfig" targets to enable the set of commands that compile on 453each so far.</p> 454 455<p><u>New commands</u>: Added an <b>sntp</b> client/server (RFC 4330 Simple Network Time 456Protocol, a compatible subset of ntp). The <b>test</b> command was rewritten 457and promoted out of pending.</p> 458 459<p><u>New options</u>: <b>grep</b> now has --color, supports embedded NUL bytes in its input, 460recognizes binary files, and passes all of grep.test (in case you 461needed the middle numerical field of -bB, etc). 462Josh Gao added ipv6 and UDP support to <b>netcat</b>. 463Volodymyr Medvid reported that install -d doesn't honor -o or -g. 464Elliott Hughes did a lot of work to support hermetic Android/AOSP builds: 465<b>mkdir</b> accepts both --parent and --parents as synonyms for -p, <b>touch</b> ignores -f, 466<b>basename</b> added -s to remove a trailing suffix, <b>dirname</b> now supports multiple 467arguments, <b>cmp</b> accepts --quiet and --silent as synonyms for -s, <b>hostname</b> 468added -sfd, <b>head</b> added --bytes as a synonym for -c and --lines as a synonym 469for -n, <b>mktemp</b> added -t and fixed -u, <b>sed</b> added -z and -iEXT to keep backup files, 470<b>md5sum</b> and sha1sum added --status and --check as synonyms -s and -c, 471<b>readlink</b> added --canonicalize as a synonym for -f, <b>sort</b> grew -V, 472<b>patch</b> added -s its synonym --quiet, <b>stat</b> added --format as 473a synonym for -c, <b>xargs</b> added -p -t -r, 474Eduardas Meile asked 475that <b>umount</b> ignore -c. Reverend Homer added a small optimization to file.c, 476and Elliott taught <b>file</b> to recognize riscv ELF binaries. Peter Collingbourne 477taught <b>ls</b> -t to use the nanoseconds field. 478<b>patch</b> has better support for patching a file with a tab in the name.</p> 479 480<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 481<b>cp</b> --preserve was segfaulting when you didn't specify _what_ to 482preserve (it now correctly defaults to "mot") and didn't get the permissions 483right when copying a symlink's contents as a regular file, 484<b>sort</b> -x didn't work when 485attached to a key, <b>host</b> didn't allocate a big enough buffer for worst 486case ipv6 address size, <b>sed</b> needed a ; between b and } when other 487implementations don't (we're already well past what posix says but a script 488out in the field broke...), 489and several fixes to <b>hostname</b> in a container, <b>ps</b>/<b>top</b> were 490misreading the VIRT and SHM fields.</p> 491 492<p><u>Pending</u>: Gavin Howard updated <b>bc</b> and added more tests, 493Marius Adaskevicius pointed out <b>mdev</b> -s should follow symlinks, 494Yangchun Fu reported a <b>dhcp</b> checksum bug, <b>modprobe</b> needed errno reset 495to avoid reporting spurious errors in verbose mode and no longer 496exits with status 1 if it can't find /etc/modprobe.conf, the <b>more</b> command 497wasn't always flushing stdout when it exited.</p> 498 499<p><u>Build</u>: 500<b>chrt</b> no longer #warns about the musl sched_get_priority_min() bug, but 501instead works around it. 502We were mixing setjmp/siglongjmp (harmless in some contexts but it kind 503of annoyed FreeBSD), and 504make install_airlock now adds sha256sum (because the Linux 4.20 build now 505needs that for the s390x target).</p> 506 507<p><u>Coding style</u>: 508Rob converted the rest of the option GLOBALS() to the new single letter 509coding style, and the new FLAG(x) macro is a slightly tidier way to say 510"toys.optflags&FLAG_x". 511Removed CFG_SORT_BIG (the sort command always 512has the full functionality now. The general future direction or toybox 513is to either have a command or not have it; multiple versions of the 514same command aren't worth the complexity in testing, documentation, 515or system adminstration).</p> 516 517<p><u>Library code</u>: 518The mkflags plumbing can now support arbitrary punctuation as option 519names via an escape syntax (because mkfs.vfat specifies an offset with -@), 520and lib/args.c now only sets FLAGS_NODASH when the first argument 521didn't have a dash (allowing "ps ax" and "ps -ax" to behave differently).</p> 522 523<p>Added an xrename() function, 524xchdir() has better error reporting, xconnect()/xbind() had their 525implementations merged, xsendto() moved from ping to lib, xpoll() now 526measures elapsed time and only waits for the remaining period when restarted, 527and Eduardas Meile converted several error_exit() to error_exit_raw() (because 528yocto 2.6 buils with -Werror=format-security by default).</p> 529 530<p>There's a scripts/portability.sh now which lets the build use gsed and gmake 531(when available) in more places to avoid broken host versions on MacOS and FreeBSD. 532The syntax of the "noreturn" attribute 533changed slightly, some calls to strnstr() were replaced with strcasestr(), 534we work around MacOS' lack of features.h, portability.h can now do Apple's 535endianness macros, and so on.</p> 536 537<p>Following the <a href=faq.html#support_horizon>seven year rule</a> 538Elliott removed support or glibc 2.10, and also 539reformatted a lot of --help text for consistency (removing trailing 540periods and such).</p> 541 542<p><u>Test suite</u>: 543The test suite now has its own version of "pending", specifically "make tests" 544skips test files without the executable bit set (unless you export $TEST_ALL). 545This eliminates "expected failures" (I.E. files with unresolved todo items) 546from the global regression test. Additional tests can be added to the global 547regression test with chmod +x as the todo items they document get resolved.</p> 548 549<p>Several places the test suite got fluffed out, including guards to skip 550root-only tests when run as a normal user. The testcmd function prints the 551short name instead of the full path to the command. 552The tests for the test command 553("test.test") no longer test the shell builtin but correctly test the 554toybox command. (Now say that ten times fast.)</p> 555 556<p>Bash version skew required replacing "continue" with "return" to stop 557tests early in bash 4.4 (for VERBOSE=fail).</p> 558 559 560<a name="31-10-2018" /><a href="#31-10-2018"><hr><h2><b>October 31, 2018</b></h2></a> 561<blockquote><p> 562"In the beginning the Universe was created. 563This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 564</p> 565</blockquote> 566 567<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.8.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.8</a> 568(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.8>git commit</a>) 569is out (a month late).</p> 570 571<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. 572You have to add an "llvm-cc" symlink to "clang", then use CROSS_COMPILE=llvm- 573with the appropriate $PATH (or absolute path in CROSS_COMPILE) for the 574target you want to build for. (To run it on a non-android host, you probably 575want "LDFLAGS=--static" too.)</p> 576 577<p><u>New commands</u>: <b>i2cdetect</b>, <b>i2cdump</b>, <b>i2cget</b>, and <b>i2cset</b> 578courtesy of Elliott/Android. The <b>watch</b> command got a complete (tty-aware) 579rewrite, and was promoted out of pending. The <b>prlimit</b> command is back 580(a configuration bug was always disabling it), and <b>ascii</b> now defaults y 581in defconfig (an oversight).</p> 582 583<p><u>New options</u>: 584The <b>ifconfig</b> command added -S (short view) giving one line of 585information per interface, in "name ipv4/mask macaddr [ipv6/mask@type...]" 586format. <b>grep</b> grew binary file detection, with -I and -a options to 587ignore them or force treating them as ascii (really utf8). 588Zach Van Rijn asked for <b>find -empty</b>. 589In the <b>file</b> command, Elliott improved java 590.class support and added .wav, .bmp, and android .dex. 591Elliott also added "getconf -a" and a lot of missing getconf symbols the 592AOSP build uses, including support for pathconf(3) symbols requiring two 593arguments. This means getconf's arguments work more like ubuntu's 594now (one or two arguments, not iterating through the supplied list and 595processing each like last release), and -l grew section identifiers (so 596the "getconf -l" output is no longer a directly consumable list of symbols 597it takes). 598Command line options specifying durations (like top -d or ping -i) can 599now use fractions and units, like "1.5" and ".1m". See "toybox --help" for 600details. 601Toybox now dereferences one layer of symlinks if it doesn't recognize the 602name it's called under (so if you "ln -s $(which sleep) blah" and then 603"./blah 30", it should figure out you mean sleep 30).</p> 604 605<p><u>Pending</u>: 606Gavin Howard contributed a large new <b>bc</b> implementation to pending, 607which covers everything the kernel build needs (and more) but is going to 608take a while to review. 609In <b>diff</b> the android guys added --color and timestamps on the 610+++/--- lines. In <b>mdev</b> Faustas Azuolas Bagdonas added support 611for mdev.conf's fourth field. Reverend Homer suggested an error message 612improvement in <b>wget</b>, Kevin Spiteri did a cleanup pass on test.c, 613and there was a cleanup pass on the passwd command.</p> 614 615<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 616Elliott responded to a bug in <b>getconf</b>'s sed-based header generation by 617replacing it with a more conventional array of #defined symbols, with #ifdefs 618for missing symbols on the three libc implementations (glibc, bionic, musl) 619we've tested so far. (This requires portability.h work to add new supported 620build environments, but at least it works on bionic now.) 621The <b>file</b> command now fails gracefully when reading pathologically 622broken ELF files (the tests for integer overflow missed one), and 623<b>date</b> no longer shows a meaningless errno when it can't parse the 624date format. 625Several fixes in <b>ping</b> (-w and -W didn't work, -c kept sending packets 626while waiting for replies, and when no reply packets were received the summary 627data was printed twice). 628Elliott fixed <b>wc</b> column widths (traditional reality doesn't match 629posix), fixed <b>modprobe</b>'s error handling (reported by Wen Xie), and 630also fixed the units on blockdev --blkraget (reported by Martijn Coenen). 631Several small fixes to the <b>stat</b> command's output (help text, quoting 632style, leading zeroes, switch -f from %t to %T), <b>oneit</b> no longer 633reboots the system when it's not called as PID 1. 634Last release's commit letting $STRIP be redefined had a typo. 635Nick Kralevich added an istty() check before calling TIOCGWINSZ (which 636triggered Android's strict ioctl filtering on non-filesystem fifos). 637An unstripped build (where the "strip" command fails for a given 638CROSS_COMPILE) will now overwrite the (read-only) output file instead of 639failing a rebuild. The dirtree plumbing no longer prints a "No" on front 640of the filename in error messages (such as "permission denied").</p> 641 642<p><u>Docmentation</u> 643Elliott updated the roadmap with Android AOSP status, towards turning that 644into a hermetic build (hopefully with an eventual self-hosting option, work 645is <a href=b33d37d6f735>already underway</a> on the airlock step). 646Rob added a little more context for LSB and described the move from Aboriginal 647Linux to mkroot. 648The <b>ps</b> help text changed: now "ps -o help" shows the fields and the normal 649--help is much more manageable. Ifconfig's --help text also got tidied up. 650Our LICENSE file has the SPDX identifier (0BSD) now, and the note about 651the kconfig/ subdirectory still having (build only, non-shipping) GPL code 652in it moved into the kconfig subdirectory.</p> 653 654<p><u>Coding style change:</u> 655GLOBALS() now uses the argument letter as the variable 656name for variables automatically set by command line arguments via lib/args.c, 657and no longer requires they be one per line. 658Removed use of the gcc 659\e extension in string constants, replacing it with \033.</p> 660 661<p><u>Library code:</u> 662lib/interestingtimes.c was renamed to lib/tty.c. 663The deflate code from toys/pending/compress.c moved to lib/deflate.c, 664which gunzip.c now uses when it's not configured to use zlib. (This reduces 665the bootstrap dependencies for the "airlock" step of a hermetic build.) 666The compression side remains a todo item. 667Added "%" to lib/args.c reading seconds (including fractions/units) into a 668long milliseconds argument. Redid xparsetime() to not need floating point, 669added xparsemillitime() for milliseconds common case, and 670parsetime() now treats leading garbage as an error instead of returning zero. 671The bufgetpwuid()/pufgetgrgid() functons can now handle more than 4k of group 672data. The set_terminal() function can now set serial speed, and microcom.c 673uses it. Added xsignal_flags(), and more consistently use xsignal() (which wraps 674sigaction()) instead of signal(). 675A new xgetrandom() function calls the new getrandom() system call, falling 676back to /dev/urandom on older kernel/libc (made to actually _work_ by 677Patrick Oppenlander).</p> 678 679<p><u>Build infrastructure:</u> 680Updated dependency detection so "make distclean defconfig toybox" now works 681all on the same command line. (This is nice when $CROSS_COMPILE changes). 682scripts/config2help.c no longer includes parts of lib/ and just copies what 683it needs into itself, improving build portability. 684The build now checks the specified cross compiler exists, hopefully providing 685a more informative error message when it doesn't. Similarly, when .config is 686missing the error message suggests running make defconfig.</p> 687 688<a name="23-06-2018" /><a href="#23-06-2018"><hr><h2><b>June 23, 2018</b></h2></a> 689<blockquote> 690<p>There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what 691the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be 692replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another 693theory which states that this has already happened.</p> 694<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 695</blockquote> 696 697<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.7.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.7</a> 698(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.7>git commit</a>) 699is out.</p> 700 701<p><u>New commands</u>: Rob Landley added <b>getconf</b>, Elliott Hughes added 702<b>uuidgen</b>, and <b>ping</b> and <b>fmt</b> were promoted out of pending.</p> 703 704<p><u>New options</u>: The <b>cp</b> command added the --parents option, 705<b>readlink</b> now has -m to show where a missing path would be, 706<b>netstat</b> got some updates (better nommu support, it can use /etc/services 707names, more command line options are bounds checked), 708Ng Zhi An added --getra and --setra (get/set readahead) to <b>blockdev</b>, 709Elliott Hughes added <b>xxd</b> -o and made <b>top</b> -d understand fractional 710sections (because the Linux Test Project uses that), and 711Minghui Liu added <b>watch</b> -b.</p> 712 713<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: Several fixes to <b>vmstat</b>: Elliott Hughes made it work on a 71448-core machine 715and fixed a glitch with -n, Haroon Maqsood pointed out "vmstat 1 1" didn't 716stop and "vmstat -n" didn't print the first theader line. 717Minghui Liu fixed a bug where <b>cp</b> -p didn't preserve 718timestamps, and pointed out the b, c, and d suffixes on numbers weren't 719working. Ryan Pritchard pointed out that <b>du</b> -d0 should act like du -s. 720Filip Perich made an RFC2347 OACK compliance fix to <b>tftp</b> in pending. 721Zach van Rijn fixed a bug in <b>xxd</b> causing incorrect translation of 722uppercase characters. 723Elliott fixed several things in <b>top</b> (removed spurious '\r' characters from -b 724output, removed interactive flicker, made running processes bold), and 725pushed Rob to make <b>file</b> work better recognizing things on stdin 726("cat /bin/ls | file -" still won't work but "file - < /bin/ls" should). 727Rob fixed a bug in <b>netstat</b> on 64 bit big endian systems, 728and fixed <b>cut</b> -DF 729(a posix compliance fix broke its ability to act as a decent awk replacment 730because outputting all delimiterless lines isn't what you want there, -D 731now disables that too).</p> 732</u></p> 733 734<p><u>Documentation</u>: Rob added a buildroot section to the roadmap with the 735prequisites that needs to run, and reformatted more of the ps --help text 736to two columns.</p> 737 738<p><u>Library</u>: 739FLAGS_NODASH is now set in toys.optargs when an optstring starting 740with & has no dash in its first argument. (This lets "ps -ax" and "ps ax" 741behave differently.) Factored out xtestfile() into lib/. 742The comma-separated-list parsing infrastructure moved to lib/commas.c. 743Added mkpath() for the common case of mkpathat() and #defined MKPATHAT_* 744constants for the uncommon cases. Elliott added better error checking 745to xparsetime() and fixed a bug in names_to_pid() (used in <b>pidof</b> 746and <b>killall</b> and such). 747Rob inlined the old toys/e2fs.h into pending's mke2fs, 748and removed a rogue semicolon from the WOULD_EXIT() macro that screwed 749up if() statement levels. The do_lines() semantics changed adding a 750callback(0,0) at the end of each file.</p> 751 752<p><u>Tests</u>: 753The test_* commands under toys/example were all renamed demo_* so 754they don't share a namespace with running a standalone command 755through the test suite (ala "make test_sed"), then 756demo_human_readable became demo_number so it can also test atolx() 757suffixes. The readlink.test was getting confused by a 758behavior difference between toybox and ubuntu (Ubuntu's ln -sf wouldn't 759replace a symlink that pointed to itself, toybox's would), now there's 760an explicit rm so it works on ubuntu too. The test suite plumbing's 761error message for a test with the wrong number of arguments now 762correctly identifies which test it's complaining about, and it can now 763run a test on a command name beginning with "-" (none yet but it 764comes up in toysh).</p> 765 766<p><u>Building</u>: You can now override strip with $STRIP. The set of 767"make install_airlock" commands got tweaked for the 4.17 kernel (which 768needs bison and flex because the new kconfig plumbing doesn't have _shipped 769versions of those generated files like the old kconfig did), and for 770the new release (remove ping, toybox provides it now). 771$LDFLAGS now applies to library probing (the android NDK provides 772dynamic libraries without corresponding --static versions). 773Elliott took a CFG_TOYBOX_DEBUG check out of an error_exit() to make 774clang stop complaining about an error that should never happen.</p> 775 776<a name="24-02-2018" /><a href="#24-02-2018"><hr><h2><b>February 24, 2018</b></h2></a> 777<blockquote><p> 778"Arthur," said Ford.<br /> 779"Hello? Yes?" said Arthur.<br /> 780"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."<br /> 781"Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that."<br /> 782</p> 783<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 784</blockquote> 785 786<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.6.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.6</a> 787(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.6>git commit</a>) 788is out, a month and change late.</p> 789 790<p>This release adds a <b>crc32</b> command and 791cleans up and promotes <b>iconv</b>, <b>logger</b>, and <b>setfattr</b>. 792Pending added <b>stty</b> and <b>fmt</b>, the other half of <b>ping</b>, 793and got a lot of cleanup on <b>gzip</b>/<b>gunzip</b>/<b>zcat</b>.</p> 794 795<p>The <b>cut</b> command got a complete rewrite adding support for multiple 796ranges, utf8/unicode characters, and new -CDFO options. Use -C to measure 797columns rather than characters (for double width chars), and "cut -DF 3-5" 798selects words (like "awk '{print $3 $4 $5}'").</p> 799 800<p>This release adds <b>top -m</b> and <b>iotop -H</b> (and fixed top width truncating for narrow terminal windows), 801added <b>iconv -c</b>, fixed <b>ps -T 1234</b> to show threads belonging to 802that PID, improved <b>file</b>'s executable identification (properly recognizing 803both endiannesses and adding sh/frv fdpic, bpf, and new microblaze 804identifiers), and <b>blkid</b> now only shows LABEL= when it isn't blank.</p> 805 806<p>Running ./configure now does "make defconfig", help_exit() now shows the 807"See %s --help" message on the same line, and several web pages 808(about, code, roadmap, cleanup) got updates.</p> 809 810<p>Elliott and the Android devs added <b>df -i</b>, <b>uptime -p</b>, 811<b>time -v</b>, and <b>xxd -i -ri</b>, 812fixed <b>id -G</b> to only output the group IDs, fixed the <b>xargs -0 -n</b> 813combination, made <b>find -exec +</b> obey ARG_MAX (just like xargs), made 814<b>killall</b> kill scripts too, fixed an off by one error in <b>pidof</b> 815that could cause false positive matches in 15 character names, added 816gzip/gunzip/zcat tests, and taught <b>file</b> to identify more stuff 817(ogg, TrueType font, LLVM bitcode, PEM certs, and PE executables), and 818for some reason needed TOYBOX_VENDOR in the version stuff. 819Android <b>getprop</b>/<b>setprop</b> now allows ro. properties to have 820arbitrary lengths, <b>losetup</b> can now find loop devices under /dev/block (where android puts 821them for historical reasons), and Andreas Gampe pointed out a thinko in 822<b>top</b> that triggered llvm's address sanitizer checks.</p> 823 824<p>Gael PORTAY asked for mdev to work when Linux has the 825block layer configured out, Patrick Oppenlander pointed out a problem 826with make bloatcheck's build dependencies, and 827xuphung on github fixed config2help building on MacOS X.</p> 828 829<p>Commands with locale support now setlocale(LC_TYPE, "C.UTF-8") for more 830targeted locale support (enable character parsing with 831utf8 support, use "C" semantics otherwise). The toys/example/test_*.c 832commands got renamed demo_*.c.</p> 833 834<p>In lib.c the millitime() function returns current unix time in milliseconds 835(which as a 64 bit number is good for + or - 292 million years from 836midnight Jan 1 1970), and the old xgetty() function became tty_fd() returning 837-1 instead of erroring out.</p> 838 839<p>The "make help" text moved from the Makefile to scripts/help.txt, 840ls.c now lists some of its deviations from posix, and work is underway 841to make ps.c more intelligible (and figure out how to break it up into 842multiple files).</p> 843 844<a name="12-10-2017" /><a href="#12-10-2017"><hr><h2><b>October 12, 2017</b></h2></a> 845<blockquote><p>Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went 846mad now?</p> 847<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 848</blockquote> 849 850<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.5.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.5</a> 851(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.5>git commit</a>) 852is out.</p> 853 854<p>This is another <b>mostly bugfix release</b>. I delayed it a bit trying to get some 855of the many half-finished projects (dd, ping, lsof, iconv, cut, sysconf, 856the cp --parents option...) finished/promoted/tested, but decided adding big 857things at the end of the dev cycle would be too destabilizing.</p> 858 859<p>A couple <b>new features</b> slipped in anyway. Ilya Kuzmich added head -c 860and strings -t (and corrected strings' output in a couple places). Elliott 861Hughes taught file to recognize Macintosh (Mach-O) binaries.</p> 862 863<p><b>NOTE</b>: the chrt command is broken when built against musl-libc 864because that project's maintainer decided he didn't like the system calls 865it depends on, so he 866<a href=https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/commit/?id=1e21e78bf7a5>removed 867them from his libc</a>. The prebuilt binaries are built against musl, 868so the chrt command there will always say -ENOSYS. (It works fine built against 869glibc, and presumably bionic or uClibc.)</p> 870 871<p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Remounting (mount -o remount,rw) should work properly now, 872and we fixed another place ps was segfaulting when /proc 873entries vanished out from under us (a hard to hit race condition 874mostly noticeable in long-running "top" exiting; error value was treated 875as a pointer). Elliott Hughes fixed a -Wformat warning in expr.c, 876and made xargs split the command 877line at ARG_MAX (which is 1/4 the stack size ulimit, which normal users 878can arbitrarily increase but execve() will complain if they don't). 879Josh Gao made netcat -l exit after handling a request, and reported a 880seq bug (seq "1000000 10000001" output 1e+06, fixed now). Zach Riggle fixed a 881broken URL in the README. Rob fixed env -0 checking the flag wrong so 882it didn't work in combination with other flags (typo).</p> 883 884<p><b>Plumbing</b>: 885Replaced mbrtowc() with a new utf8towc() that doesn't have a context 886struct or care about locale. A bugfix in comma_scan() (wasn't removing an entry at the end 887of the list) is why remount _sometimes_ worked (depending on argument 888order), xgetaddrinfo() is now separate from xconnect(), 889atolx_range() learned the w (word=2) suffix, and b is now (block=512) instead 890of (byte=1).</p> 891 892<p><b>Build</b>: Patrick Oppenlander added a workaround for a bug in config2help.c 893that resulted in segfaults on newer toolchains. (It was actually a use 894after free error; the build infrastructure isn't nearly as heavily audited as 895code that gets installed on the target; oops.) A new GITHASH 896environment variable can force the build version from 897the command line, and the build checks for .git in the top directory 898before asking git what our version is (so it isn't confused by ../../.git 899in an enclosing directory). Added a build #warning about musl intentionally 900breaking chrt (as with nommu fork() musl now provides a broken 901stub function so compile-time probes for its existence think it's there, and 902you can't run the result to test behavior when cross compiling).</p> 903 904<a name="19-06-2017" /><a href="#19-06-2017"><hr><h2><b>June 19, 2017</b></h2></a> 905<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. 906To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.</p> 907<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 908</blockquote> 909 910<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.4.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.4</a> 911(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.4>git commit</a>) 912is out. No new commands this time, but 913<b>chrt</b> and <b>dmesg</b> got promoted out of pending.</p> 914 915<p><u>New features</u>: 916Rob rewrote paste, which should work much better now, and added grep 917-M and -S to match and skip wildcards respectively (useful with -r). 918Elliott's updated dmesg has -T and --color. The file 919command can recognize gzip now, uptime grew -s, date grew %N, env knows - as a first argument 920means -i (posix!) and grew -0, ls defaults to -b 921instead of -q now when there's a tty, and ls has a new -ll option (with 922--full-time as a compatibility synonym) showing nanoseconds and (for some 923reason) timezone. (Why do individual files have timezones?) Elliott added 924"uudecode -o -" support. Illya Kuzmich taught head -v and -q. The cpio 925code no longer adds the "TRAILER!!!" entry by default (initramfs extractor 926doesn't care) without which you can concatenate cpio archives with "cat". 927(Use the new --trailer option if you want the legacy behavior.) 928In pending, fdisk compiles now and tar understands bzip2.</p> 929 930<p><u>Build</u>: 931The "make install_airlock" target now symlinks bc from the host because 932the kernel <a href=https://landley.net/notes-2013.html#28-03-2013>inexplicably</a> 933needs that to build. This was motivated by 934<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a>, which builds under 935a toybox airlock directory.</p> 936 937<p>Lots of work on the test suite, mostly from the Android guys who are now 938running it under Android. This fixed several existing tests that didn't 939pass, made more tests run on a toybox-only system, and so on. The test suite 940infrastructure now has a second testing function, 941"testcmd", which supplies the command name being tested (bypassing 942shell builtins).</p> 943 944<p>Various android build and config fixes, getting closer to being able 945to let android someday use scripts/make.sh instead of generated/* snapshots. 946Also more work into building under android's NDK; not quite there yet 947but much closer. 948Use nproc in scripts/make.sh detect available processors (so you can control the SMP level with taskset). 949Removed the old uClibc compatibility glue, it's been 5 years since their 950<a href=http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2016-December/180102.html>last release</a>.</p> 951 952<p>The new config option TOYBOX_PEDANTIC_ARGS checks arguments when there 953are no arguments, so things like "uptime" no longer silently ignore arguments 954you pass but instead refuse to run.</p> 955 956<p><u>Docs</u>: 957The FAQ now has more than one entry. Commands no longer output the full 958help text for argument errors but instead just say "See %s --help" with the 959command name (in addition to the actual error message). 960Elliott did a big period-ectomy on all the --help text, and 961we cleaned up some tab/space inconsistency. The 962non-html help -a output now has separators with the command name. 963The top/iotop and pkill/pgrep help text now describe a lot more of what 964the commands can do. Twitter's code of conduct page went down so we 965mirrored the text locally.</p> 966 967<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 968Fixed a race condition in ps/top where a process that exited right as we 969read its data returned a different error value than we were expecting (which 970was causing long-running top instances to occasionally exit), 971mount now gives an error if it can't autodetect the filesystem 972type, ps no longer queries the terminal size when output isn't to a tty 973(so "ps -A | cat" doesn't vary), date's chkmktime() was replaced with 974simple range checks for fields (to avoid false positives from things like 975timezones and daylight savings time), removed %s from date's help (we 976didn't implement it, we have @seconds[.nanoseconds] instead), fixed 977zcat's buffer flush logic (which was always failing on files larger 978than 32k), and factor now detects requests for numbers >64 bits and fails 979loudly instead of producing incorrect answers. 980Elliott fixed touch -a/-m (they were backwards), and allowed ':' in 981setprop's property names. Grep now exits with 2 for errors (so -q can 982distinguish "didn't find" from "didn't work"), doesn't stop on symlinks 983that point nowhere (there was an error_exit() that should just be a warning), 984and provides error messages for files we could open but not read.</p> 985 986<p><u>Library</u>: 987New library functions: strend() complements strstart(), minof()/maxof() 988are min/max macros that evalute arguments once and autodetect type (why 989isn't this in libc?), xmmap() checks MAP_FAILED (which is not NULL).</p> 990 991<a name="21-02-2017" /><a href="#21-02-2017"><hr><h2><b>February 21, 2017</b></h2></a> 992<blockquote><p>Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the 993Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention 994away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.</p> 995<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 996 997<p>Despite everything, <a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.3.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.3</a> 998(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.3>git commit</a>) 999is out. The <u>new commands</u> this time are <b>ftpget</b>, <b>ftpput</b>, <b>microcom</b>, and <b>ascii</b>.<p> 1000
1001<p>We also had two command _demotions_ out of defconfig: 1002<b>hostid</b> got moved to toys/example and 1003switched to "default n" because despite <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/gethostid.html>still being in posix</a> 1004the concept of a unique 32 bit number identifying a system is something 1005Linux outgrew about the time Pauline Middelink wrote the first IP 1006Masquerading code. And Elliott did a complete rewrite of <b>dmesg</b> introducing 1007two codepaths that I didn't get a chance to unify and didn't want to 1008hold up the release for, so that's back in pending.</p> 1009 1010<p><u>New features</u>: Rob added units to <b>find</b> -atime and friends 1011(with the legacy -amin alias). Elliott added color and -w to dmesg, fallocate 1012-o, and improved file's ELF parsing. Steve Muckle added -d and finit_module 1013support to modprobe. Rob and Elliott tweaked the 1014ps/top display format a bit more (extending the USER field from 8 to 18 chars 1015and putting + at the end of string fields that got truncated). 1016df -a isn't entirely new, but wasn't documented and needed a bugfix.</p> 1017 1018<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 1019Last release broke oneit because -c didn't get moved to xopen_stdio() (oops). 1020Rob and Elliott simultaneously spotted ps padding each line to 99999 1021chars when there's no tty (serial console or adb); now it pads to 80 in 1022that case but also switches on -w to avoid field truncation. The "tty" 1023field also sometimes had trailing debris (that's fixed now). And "top" was 1024endlessly redrawing with out tty because receipt of the ANSI size probe 1025results would set SIGWINCH, and handling that sent another ansi probe. (Sigh.) 1026And while we're there, replace "ADDR" with "BIT" in ps -l so there are 1027more than 4 chars left for the "CMD" field on 64 bit systems.</p> 1028 1029<p>Izabera pointed out that split -b and -l can't mix, and suggested seq should 1030multiply to avoid accumulating rounding errors from repeated fractional 1031increments. Wang Xiao Jian fixed a bug in sort -k. 1032Elliott let getprop use the @ character in property names, and 1033Dimitry Ivanov removed the name length limit for system properties. 1034Elliott also improved some error reporting and improved top -H's display 1035of thread names. 1036 1037<p>Josh Gao pointed out that recursive operations on . and .. could be ignored 1038in chmod -R (and the resulting generic fix to dirtree_notdotdot() fixed 1039it in several other places).</p> 1040 1041<p>Justin Cormack caught tar producing a warning to stdout that screwed up 1042"tar c" to stdout. 1043Rob fixed an option parsing bug (where switching off a --longopt in menuconfig 1044confused the parser), and another one where an option excluding itself 1045(ala "abc[-ab][!abc]" with "command -a -b") would segfault.</p> 1046 1047<p>There's some sort of gcc stack over-optimization bug where musl-libc's 1048version of vfork() doesn't get marked with attribute(returns_twice) so 1049stack varabiles in the same function after that get semi-randomly overwritten 1050when the optimizer decides to reclaim the space. So add the attribute 1051to the function the XVFORK() wrapper macro calls. (It's a nommu thing.)</p> 1052 1053<p>Fixed a couple variable size mismatch bugs that were only tested on 64 bit 1054(printf %x 64) or only tested on 32 bit (modprobe), removed some 1055unnecessary casts in stat.</p> 1056 1057<p>Continuing attempts to build under Android NDK brought up that posix 1058defines the global 'stdout' as a macro, which older versions of bionic 1059turned into an array member, but a function was using it as an argument 1060name. (This worked in the AOSP build because it only builds against current 1061bionic, where there's a global 'stdout'.)</p> 1062 1063<p>Several commits argued with clang's warning generation, eventually 1064settling on a variant of __attribute__((__shut_up__)).</p> 1065 1066<p>Android should no longer give spurious error messages 1067when you "ps -A | head" about EPIPE on output. (Older versions of bionic 1068set an error handler on SIGPIPE, but it shouldn't do that now. More recent 1069versions of adb set the SIGPIPE handler to SIGIGN instead of SIGDFL, 1070leading to write returning an error message instead of silently killing 1071the program. So we set it back to the default.)</p> 1072 1073<p><u>Docs</u>: 1074Removed website link to the gmane archive (which didn't survive gmane's 1075change of ownership). The FAQ now answers a _second_ question. (Woo!) 1076Some roadmap updates.</p> 1077 1078<p><u>Build tweaks</u>: 1079Upgraded "make install_airlock" target to only warn about missing 1080commands (unless $PEDANTIC is set) when it sets up the hermetic build 1081path. (The plan is still to implement everything but the toolchain 1082binaries in toybox, but in the meantime we're symlinking other stuff from 1083the $HOST that isn't ready yet. See 1084<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> for an example using 1085this.)</p> 1086 1087<p>Elliott and Rob continue to poke at building toybox with Android's NDK, 1088but it's a work in progress (<a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-December/008767.html>thread</a>). Various changes 1089removing libcutils dependencies and adding an selinux dependency to getprop 1090are fallout from this.</p> 1091 1092<p>Cross-compiling from Macs needs to use "gsed" instead of apple's 1093version, so teach the build to use that name if it exists in the $PATH. 1094If you try to build without running config first, you should get better 1095error reporting now. Added a workaround for Centos' broken "which" command 1096producing output when it _can't_ find a name in the $PATH.</p> 1097 1098<p><u>Library</u>: 1099The new dirtree flag DIRTREE_PROC skips non-numeric entries so things 1100like ps and top can scan /proc more efficiently.</p> 1101 1102<a name="21-10-2016" /><a href="#21-10-2016"><hr><h2><b>October 21, 2016</b></h2></a> 1103<blockquote><p>Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat, 1104we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your 1105own problem.</p><p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 1106 1107<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.2</a> 1108(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.2>git commit</a>) 1109is out.</p> 1110 1111<p>During this development cycle, Elliott Hughes <a href=http://androidbackstage.blogspot.com/2016/07/episode-53-adb-on-adb.html>got interviewed 1112on the ADB podcast</a> 1113and 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>). 1114Both talk about toybox and many other things. 1115The web page also grew a new <a href=faq.html>FAQ page</a>, currently with 1116just the one.</p> 1117 1118<p>New comands added to defconfig are <b>tunctl</b>, 1119<b>log</b>, <b>start</b>, <b>stop</b>, and <b>sendevent</b>. 1120The commands <b>file</b> and <b>netstat</b> got promoted out of pending. 1121Pending added <b>chrt</b>, <b>setfattr</b>, and <b>getfattr</b>, and saw 1122a lot of cleanups to diffstat and dd but not enough to promote them to 1123defconfig yet. A new toys/net directory was added, moving ifconfig, netcat, 1124netstat, rfkill, and tunctl there so far.</p> 1125 1126<p><b>Upgrades</b>: All commands now parse --version when they understand 1127--help, but "true" and "false" should now ignore their arguments entirely. 1128We taught stat to handle "%12x" and "%.12x" printf-style escapes, which 1129apparently other versions do. The ifconfig output now shows the interface's 1130device driver. Added patch -d and --dry-run, wc can now do -cm together, 1131find has a NOP -noleaf so scripts that use that don't break, add -c to md5sum 1132and sha1sum. Elliott taught ps to treat extra aguments as additional -p 1133pids, implemented xxd -s, did a number of upgrades to file (added -HL, 1134support for ar files, improved ELF support to report android API level 1135and stripped/not stripped and it no longer prints a guessed build ID type). 1136Elliott also added optional build-time support for using openssl's 1137assembly-optimized md5sum/sha1sum implementations (leading to a new 1138<a href=design.html>design</a> policy on shared libraries).</p> 1139 1140<p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Too many fixes to "ps" and "touch" to list, from both 1141Elliott and Rob. Rob taught sed to handle s/[[:space:]/]// type sequences 1142properly, switched grep to a better 1143workaround 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, 1144made du max out at 2 terabytes instead of 2 gigabytes on 32-bit systems 1145(it was always designed to, but was missing a typecast), 1146fixed the option parsing infrastructure (config options that remove command 1147line options got the placeholders wrong), fix to printf for printing 1148octal digits and handling the (posix-mandated) difference between %b and 1149non-%b octal output, reading from "-" no longer closes stdin when done, 1150netcat -L works with nommu (although it may need more portability work), 1151and you can now "make test_scankey" if you want to. Several commands 1152(stat, makedeves, chgrp, cp, find) handled user name lookup failure badly 1153(stat was segfaulting if you interrogated a file belonging to a nonexistent 1154user, "chown 12345 file" errored out if you didn't have that user 1155in /etc/passwd... now they should all print/accept the number when 1156appropriate). "LC_ALL=C ls -Cs --color" produces the same output 1157as other versions (two spaces padding, -k hardwired on).<p> 1158 1159<p>Kyungsik Lee fixed a bug 1160in cp (readlink() doesn't actually null terminate the string it reads in), 1161Elliott Hughes made pgrep/pkill return success/failure, fixed trailing 1162whitespace in netstat, fixed a SMACK symbol conflict due to linux/xattr.h 1163changing, fixed ls -sh, and added a lot of 1164stuff to the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap page</a>. 1165Izabera pointed out cmp -l and -s can't be selected at the same time, 1166that timeout was never actually checking -v, that ls should default to -q 1167when output is to a tty, and that "file -" would sometimes try to open "-" 1168instead of stdin. 1169Usischev Yury pointed out a use after free error, and that id shouldn't 1170call exit() directly. Matthias Urhahn pointed out that stat(2) returns 1171hardwired 512-byte units, so stat.c was wrong. David Hedges pointed out 1172that route could only handle 10 character interface names when the kernel 1173can do 15 (it's still in pending for a reason, but fixed). Evgenii 1174Stepanov found and helped diagnose one of the more subtle ps bugs fixed 1175this time around.</p> 1176 1177<p>Calling "make test_blah" no longer causes make to error out if the last 1178test fails (and thus returns a nonzero error code). 1179Building single commands and the multiplexer used to require a "make clean" 1180between them (because they had different config files both of which were older 1181than generated/config.h so it didn't get rebuilt; now it just always 1182rebuilds it).</p> 1183 1184<p>The defconfig build is now slightly less broken on older centos versions 1185(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> 1186 1187<p>Several commands were over-using xprintf(), which flushes its output 1188to check for error (something you only need to do maybe once per line, 1189and even then maybe only in loops because xexit() flushes and checks 1190ferror() for you and adjusts the exit code if we wrote stuff to stdout 1191that couldn't be printed). Lots of little flushes are inefficient, 1192so most things can use normal printf(). (Retransmission 1193of short writes is presumably libc's problem since it's buffering the 1194output and all.)</p> 1195 1196<p><b>Library:</b> 1197New library functions readlink0() and readlinkat0() which properly null 1198terminates the symlink value (which the stock libc function inexplicably 1199doesn't). 1200The new do_lines() function interates reading lines from a filehandle 1201and calling a function on each line. 1202New function pollinate() factoring out netcat's poll() loop so things 1203like telnet can use it. 1204New functions getusername() and getgroupname() return a 1205char * given a uid/gid (and return a string representation of the number 1206if the lookup fails), and xgetpwnamid/xgetgrnamid were renamed to 1207xgetuid/xgetgid and now return an integer instead of a struct (also helping 1208handle lookup failures, you can still return the uid/get for "12345").</p> 1209 1210<p>Switched atolx() to use long long internally. 1211Renamed xopen() to xopen_stdio() and made a new xopen() that never returns 1212stdin, stdout, or stderr (duping /dev/null into the filehandles as necessary). 1213New function xopenro() opens a file read only with one less argument, and 1214understands that "-" means stdin. New flag WARN_ONLY tells these functions 1215to just print a warning on failure, and return -1 instead of exiting. 1216Misc new functions like openro() which defaults to the WARN_ONLY behavior 1217and notstdio() which dup()s a filehandle up beyond stdin/out/err backfilling 1218with /dev/null as necessary. The WARN_ONLY flag let us remove the failok 1219argument from loopfiles().</p> 1220 1221<p>New TOYFLAG_NOHELP disables --help processing (which "true" and "false" 1222should not do).</b> 1223 1224<p>The test suite now has NOSPACE=1 to ignore whitespace (using diff -b to 1225check results), which helps TEST_HOST pass the same tests as toybox. 1226Fixes to chattr and date tests. It also has a new variable $C with the 1227absolute path to the command being tested (bypassing shell builtins), 1228and a function testcmd() which is just like testing() except it prepends 1229the command name ($C) to the test command line as well as the test 1230description.</p> 1231 1232<a name="02-06-2016" /><a href="#02-06-2016"><hr><h2><b>June 2, 2016</b></h2></a> 1233<blockquote><p>When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but 1234highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic 1235analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental 1236signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's 1237brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows 1238quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of 1239liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.</p> 1240<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 1241 1242<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.1</a> 1243(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.1>git commit</a>) 1244is out. (Yes, I forgot to update the --version string, but I already 1245uploaded the <a href=downloads/binaries/0.7.1>binaries</a>.)</p> 1246 1247<p>The website has https support now, you can "make cat ps ls" 1248to get standalone commands (and "make list list_pending" to see what's 1249available), and a whole lot of bugfixes and new options to existing 1250commands.</p> 1251 1252<h2>New Commands</h2> 1253<p>Rob implemented <b>ulimit</b>. In pending, Elliott Hughes implemented 1254file. and Lipi Lee implemented a simple wget. (Pending also had minor 1255cleanups to more and lsof, but no promotions this time around.)</p> 1256 1257<h2>New Options</h2> 1258<p>Izabera implemented env -u, suggested adding seq -w, made factor 1259use full unsigned 64 bit math even on 32 bit platforms, pointed out base64 1260-w0 should disable wrapping, and sped up wc -c. 1261Elliott Hughes added mount -o relatime, xxd -p -r, and od -w. 1262Sameer Pradhan (or possibly Bilal Qureshi) suggested adding stat -tL -c %m%t%T. 1263Tom Cherry added getprop -Z. Paul Barker added hostname -b and -F. 1264Rob added ls -b, made ls -q work with utf8, 1265made sed -f - read from stdin, and added top -O (like ps -O).</p> 1266 1267<p>Elliott and Rob <b>added Thread support to ps and top</b>, 1268with -o TID, TNAME. We also added -o PCY (android scheduling policy), 1269-o BIT (process is 32 or 64 bit), and -o TNAME now shows the parent 1270command name for threads.</p> 1271 1272<h2>Documentation</h2> 1273 1274<p>Rob added the sed invocations to convert tabs/spaces and back to 1275design.html. Isaac Dunham updated hexedit's help text. 1276Jakob Flierl pointed out a broken URL in the README.</p> 1277 1278<p>Rob also redid the naming scheme of sed's pattern manipulation code to 1279remove the gratuitous references to Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series, since it 1280was confusing people.</p> 1281 1282<h2>Bugfixes</h2> 1283 1284<p>Grep -H and -n should now work properly with -ABC. Andy Chu pointed out an 1285out of bounds access for zero length lines in rev, fixed a buffer overflow 1286in diff -r, and fixed operator precedence in expr (although Rob is rewriting 1287chunks of expr so toysh can use its plumbing for $(( )) ). 1288Patrick Ohly fixed the too-aggressive suid permission dropping logic. 1289Josh Gao fixed a segfault when find -iname got no argument, and 1290made tail -f work right with just one file argument. 1291Tom Marshall cleaned up tar's long filename support and improved 1292the tar tests, and reported another find bug (with -iname -o -iname not 1293tracking copy lifetimes properly) that got fixed.</p> 1294 1295<p>Elliott Hughes fixed wc -c to not trust zero length files to actually be 1296zero length (/proc does that), fixed "mount -o rw,remount /system" on 1297Android, removed trailing spaces on ps -o cmdline, fixed pkill -9 and 1298the corresponding tests, made "insmod -" work, fixed top -b and tail -NUM, 1299pointed out that ps shouldn't trim numeric fields for display size limits, 1300and added some more 1301explicit "sort" calls to make pipelines so build tempfiles are easier to cache. 1302Rob <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/32b3587af261>fixed an insane sed thing</a> the perl 5.22 build was doing. 1303Fixed mount -o to properly pass in leftover string data, and 1304<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 1305to fix some bitrot in the kernel NFS driver's string parsing attached 1306to that message).</p> 1307 1308<p>George Burgess IV corrected some variable types in traceroute. 1309Base64 now wraps == properly. Fixed two bzcat segfaults reported by 1310John Regehr. Andy Chu found a segfault in "sed -e 'c\'" with no trailing 1311line, and implemented mv -n and cp -n. The cyanogenmod guys pointed out that 1312cp -a shouldn't complain if a non-root user can't chown, and we added 1313the output path to cp -r error messages while we were there (before was just 1314the filename).</p> 1315 1316<p>Samuel Holland fixed blkid's handling of vfat labels, and 1317fixed a segfault when basename was passed an empty string and an empty 1318suffix. Davis Mosenkovs fixed touch -t seconds parsing. 1319Rob fixed a bunzip bug reported by John Regehr (the bad CRC 1320error message was printing a NUL argument).</p> 1321 1322<p>Not all of the commands build standalone, but more of them do now; 1323scripts/single.sh can now build a "mv" that isn't actually "cp". 1324The dependencies are more granualr, so "make top; make ps" no longer 1325produces a broken ps that ignores -A (because ps.o wasn't getting rebuilt 1326even though top had the FLAG macros for -A zeroed).</p> 1327 1328<h2>Build</h2> 1329<p>Rob added a <b>warning when building commands out of 1330pending</b>. (The pending directory is full of code that hasn't been 1331properly vetted. Use at your own risk.)</p> 1332 1333<p><b>New build targets let you build individual commands by name</b>, ala 1334"make ls cat ps", and you can run the test suite for each standalone 1335command with "make test_ls" and such. 1336"make list" shows all such standalone commands in defconfig, and 1337"make list_pending" shows unfinished commands from toys/pending 1338("make list list_pending" shows both together). "make clean" now deletes 1339these filenames at the top level, and the corresponding unstripped files 1340live in the directory generated/unstripped.</p> 1341 1342<p>Nicholas Boichat suggested switching make.sh to use $! for process 1343enumeration during parallel builds (which is both more efficient and more 1344portable), and suggested shell builtin replacements for wc/awk/sed so the 1345build loop has fewer forks now.</p> 1346 1347<p>Lots of work on the test suite, much of it due to Andy Chu. It now 1348consistently prints the name of the command being tested at the start of each 1349test (and the common infrastructure does that, not each individual test), and 1350"make tests" actually runs all the available tests now. 1351Seperated pgrep and pkill tests, split lsattr/chattr, added fstype and base64 1352tests. The "tests/files" directory now collects files for tests to 1353use, with blkid, bzcat, and utf8 subdirectories: the $FILES variable 1354gives a path to it, so "$FILES/blkid/ext2.bz2" and so on. 1355The testsuite now has test files with 3 different types of "not utf8 output" 1356sequences that require escaping, plus some combining character torture 1357tests, direction reversals, and so on.</p> 1358 1359<p>Added dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK to various pending commands that need 1360nommu conversion (which should fix the allyesconfig build).</p> 1361 1362<p>Static builds with selinux should work again.</p> 1363 1364<h2>Library</h2> 1365 1366<p>New bufgetgrgid() and bufgetpwuid() functions cache previous lookup info 1367rather than repeatedly traversing /etc/passwd and /etc/group (which is slow). 1368Added xpipe() to lib to catch pipe creation failure. 1369The HELP_ macros generated by config2help.c now use a capital prefix 1370to avoid collicing with help_exit() and such.</p> 1371 1372<p>The dirtree infrastructure got a cleanup pass in preparation for adding 1373infinite recursion depth support (needed by rm -r), updated the 1374<a href=code.html#ib_dirtree>documentation</a> to describe the new 1375semantics (removing dirtree_start() and adding dirtree_flagread()). 1376Now dirtree_recurse() takes the new dirfd as an argument.</p> 1377 1378<p>Split out _xexit() from xexit() and let sigatexit() set multiple 1379callbacks.</p> 1380 1381<p>For years the man pages have said to #include <sys/types.h> to get 1382major/minor/makedev but now that glibc 1383<a href=https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-11/msg00253.html>has vowed 1384to break existing programs</a> and replace it with another nonstandard header 1385not in posix or lsb, we added our own functions to lib/ to do the transform 1386ourselves (based on what the kernel actually expects).</p> 1387 1388<h2>Portability</h2> 1389 1390<p>Debian unstable started needing an extra header #include for some reason, and 1391although printf("%.*s", INT_MAX, s) worked fine on Ubuntu 12.04 it 1392didn't on 14.04, so added a workaround for that. Typecast a printf because 1393wchar_t isn't a rigidly defined size. RLIMIT_RTTIME was 1394added to the kernel in 2008 but you can't expect uClibc to have noticed yet, 1395nor did it #define MS_RELATIME (added in 2006), or prlimit (2010)... 1396(Given the improvements in musl and bionic, uClibc support may be dropped 1397in a future release.) Given that the xattr functions were added during 1398linux 2.5, we can #include its header unconditionally.</p> 1399 1400<p>Renamed basename_r() to something else to avoid conflicting with freebsd's 1401libc, and both scripts/install.h and scripts/config2help.c no longer include 1402toys.h (to make cross-compiling from systems we don't run on easier).</p> 1403 1404<p>Debian bug 635570 did something unspeakably nonportable, depending on 1405"sed -e 'a\'" (with no next line of the pattern, so an unterminated 1406continuation) to add a newline to the last line of input if and only if 1407that last line of the input didn't have a newline, and to take no other 1408action. This is well into "depending on a bug" territory, but we implemented 1409it because otherwise Debian's install broke. (Of course this behavior 1410is undocumented, non-obvious, and doesn't really make logical sense.)</p> 1411 1412<p>CONFIG_TOYBOX_NORECURSE now disables the stack measuring logic (which 1413was giving some "security" code fits). Also we typecast pointers to (long) 1414before comparing them to avoid spurious compiler "optimizations" that 1415break the code.</p> 1416 1417<a name="02-02-2016" /><a href="#02-02-2016"><hr><h2><b>February 2, 2016</b></h2></a> 1418<blockquote><p>"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that 1419quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with 1420you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." 1421- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1422 1423<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.0</a> 1424(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.0>git commit</a>) 1425is out.</p> 1426 1427<p>The new commands in defconfig are <b>iotop</b>, <b>top</b>, <b>pgrep</b>, 1428and <b>pkill</b> 1429(most replacing corresponding versions from pending). Added grep -ABC, 1430swapon -d (discard), mkswap -L (label) and UUID support, and find -delete. 1431Izabera added free -h and unshare -f. Josh Gao implemented tail -f. 1432Jose Bollo submitted cp --preserve=context,attr. Kylie McClain added 1433mktemp -u.</p> 1434 1435<p>In pending there's the start of a vi command, and Sameer Pradhan contributed 1436a new dhcp6. This cycle saw several rounds of route cleanup and a little dhcp 1437cleanup, but neither are complete yet. Lipi Lee did some cleanup to netstat.c 1438and Elliott Hughes removed warnings from traceroute.</p> 1439 1440<p>Lots of updates to ps: several new -o options, -k (--sort) -O and -M, 1441improved compatibility with Android's historical behavior, and 1442extensive internal code cleanup (including the removal of all 1443the magic constants).</p> 1444 1445<h3><b>Website</b></h3> 1446 1447<p>Dreamhost restored the <a href="#12-21-2015">missing 11 months</a> 1448to the mailing list archive, in the process deleting the month after 1449that. Now they've asked if I have mbox files archiving the new 1450gap (between December 20, 2015 to January 21, 2016, and presumably they 1451could also fill in the gap from December 14, 2014 to January 3, 2015 that's 1452been there since the last time they did this), 1453but due to some gmail filtering I've 1454<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2012.html#15-10-2012>never 1455been able to disable</a>, my copy of those files is spread among 3 different 1456mbox files I'd have to sort/filter/collate. (It's on the todo list.)</p> 1457 1458<p>Added a code of conduct to the README (we're 1459<a href=https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/code-of-conduct>borrowing twitter's</a>) because somebody 1460made it necessary.</p> 1461 1462<h3><b>Bugfixes</b></h3> 1463<p>Fixed another sed bug where any ] right after [ was skipped (not just the 1464first one in the range, so [[] didn't terminate). Fixed sort -f and added test cases. 1465Assume 80 columns in "ls -m | cat", ls -L is no longer backwards, 1466and ls of files with no paths no longer uses an uninitialized (zero) dirfd. 1467Several bugfixes 1468to find (Gilad Arnold fixed -perm, Daniel K. Levy fixed "find . -exec echo {}", 1469and while we're there I fixed find --prune, made "find . -execdir 1470echo {} + -execdir ls {} +" work, and ripped out the environment size 1471measuring code that checked for a 128k limit removed back in linux 2.6.22). 1472Elliott Hughes fixed the date command's parsing of 4 digit 1473years and documented the %s escape, fixed hwclock -u, and pointed out 1474that runcon needs to exec to do its job (not recursively call another 1475command_main() in the same process). Tom Marshall reported that blkid was 1476handling ext2 wrong. Mike Moreton corrected cpio extraction's uid and gid 1477values, and added a --no-preserve-owner option. Fixed the SUID permission 1478dropping logic (which was a bit over-zealous, preventing some commands from 1479running at all).</p> 1480 1481<p>I'm told that debian-testing broke its libc so the nsenter build breaks, 1482but my attempts to install the debian-testing network cd image under 1483qemu keep breaking. Maybe someday they'll fix it enough I can actually 1484reproduce the problem. (Debootstrap under unbuntu builds an ubuntu-flavored 1485chroot in which toybox builds fine.)</p> 1486 1487<h3><b>Documentation</b></h3> 1488<p>Rewrite of the about.html page, tweaks to design.html, and a re-triage of 1489sbase in roadmap.html. Update to mkstatus.py to collate multiple span 1490tags with the same id, resulting in a larger status.html page (which 1491was previously ignoring some commands in the roadmap).</p> 1492 1493<p>Expanded the defconfig/allyesconfig/allnoconfighelp text in "make help" 1494to explain what they're for.</p> 1495 1496<h3><b>infrastructure</b></h3> 1497<ul> 1498<li><p>Expanded toys.optargs to 64 bits so a command can have more than 32 options.</p></li> 1499<li><p>Added NOEXIT() wrapper to turn xwrap() functions into warning versions 1500using the existing longjump(toys.rebound) infrastructure.</p></li> 1501<li><p>Renamed dirtree->data to dirfd and stopped storing symlink length 1502into it (this fixed a bug where following symlinks to directories 1503didn't give a valid directory filehandle, noticeable with ls -Z).</p></li> 1504<li><p>New TAGGED_ARRAY() infrastructure generates index and bitmask macros 1505for arrays of structures starting with a name string.</p></li> 1506<li><p>New lib/linestack.c for utf8 fontmetrics (draw_str() and utf8len() 1507and so on), and for tracking multiple lines of text 1508(vi, less, shell history) that need wordwrapping and scrolling up/down.</p></li> 1509<li><p>Upgrades to lib/interestingtimes.c: scan_key() now has a timeout 1510in milliseconds and recognizes more sequences including ANSI 1511window size probes. New utf8 test files in tests/files/utf8 including 1512sequence reversing, stacked combining chars, and all three types of 1513unprintable sequences (low ascii <32 ala ^X, invalid utf8 sequences ala 1514<AB><CD>, and invalid unicode code points ala U+1234).</p></li> 1515<li><p>More comma handling code in lib.c: comma_args()</p></li> 1516<li><p>Added error_msg_raw() to shut up fortify's endless static checking false 1517positives.</p></li> 1518<li><p>readfileat() can now realloc() in a loop to read long files 1519("zcat | insmod" needed it).</p></li> 1520</ul> 1521 1522<h3><b>Roadmap</b></h3> 1523<p>We're getting close to having a self-hosting development environment 1524using toybox for the command line. The remaining busybox commands in 1525<a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>Aboriginal Linux</a> are:</p> 1526 1527<blockquote><p><b> 1528awk bunzip2 bzcat bzip2 dd diff expr fdisk ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip gzip 1529less ping route sh sha512sum tar test tr unxz vi wget xzcat zcat 1530</b></p></blockquote> 1531 1532<p>And the remaining non-busybox commands in Aboriginal Linux's build/host 1533directory (from the distcc, genext2fs, e2fsprogs, zlib, and squashfs packagesi) 1534are:</p> 1535 1536<blockquote><p><b> 1537mke2fs fsck.ext2 resize2fs distcc genext2fs unsquashfs distccd mksquashfs tune2fs 1538</b></p></blockquote> 1539 1540<p>Squashfs and distcc are probably out of scope for toybox, but mke2fs, 1541fsck.ext2, resize2fs, genext2fs, and tune2fs should all be added to the 1542above "busybox" replacement list.</p> 1543 1544<p>Remind me to include this countdown in future releases. Once they've all 1545been replaced, the next goal is <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>building AOSP under itself</a>.</p> 1546 1547<p>See the full <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> and <a href=status.html>status</a> 1548pages for more details.</p> 1549 1550<a name="12-21-2015" /><a href="#12-21-2015"><hr><h2><b>December 21, 2015</b></h2></a> 1551 1552<p>Yes, 11 months have gone missing from the mailing list web archive.</p> 1553 1554<p>Yesterday evening Dreamhost's mailman server went down (timing out trying 1555to connect). I poked them about it, they 1556<a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/678781271670149121>blamed 1557DNS</a>, I explained that the hang was _after_ the DNS lookup and 1558entered the dig info into the trouble ticket showing the IPs the DNS 1559queries were returning, they reinstalled the server at that IP from what I 1560assume was their most recent backup, and that's how 11 months of messages 1561vanished out of the archive.</p> 1562 1563<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 1564can do. <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>Last time</a> 1565this sort of thing <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>happened</a> 1566we went back and forth for months, so I added a link to a backup web 1567archive (in the nav bar on the left) that isn't controlled by dreamhost, 1568and thus doesn't gratuitously lose data on a regular basis. (I note 1569the earlier hole in Dreamhost's archive was never fixed either. That 1570was data never getting archived, this is a year's worth of data that 1571was in the archive until yesterday vanishing after the fact.)</p> 1572 1573<p>If you're wondering why the <a href=http://lists.landley.net>top level</a> 1574list page has been "temporarily disabled" for multiple years now... you'd have 1575to ask Dreamhost. I know I have. More than a dozen times.</p> 1576 1577<a name="03-11-2015" /><a href="#03-11-2015"><hr><h2><b>November 3, 2015</b></h2></a> 1578<blockquote><p>"Alright," said Ford. "How would you react if I said that I'm 1579not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity 1580of Betelgeuse?" Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way. "I don't know," he 1581said, taking a pull of beer. "Why - do you think it's the sort of thing you're 1582likely to say?" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1583 1584<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.1</a> 1585(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.1>git commit</a>) 1586is out.</p> 1587 1588<p>We have a new <b>ps</b> command with all the -o fields posix wants (although 1589it doesn't accept BSD non-dash option syntax yet), and <b>bunzip2</b> (not just 1590bzcat but the proper extract-in-place command). 1591Sameer Pradhan added <b>hostid</b> and <b>fsync</b>. 1592Elliott Hughes added <b>flock</b>. 1593 1594<p>The people waiting for <b>human readable number support</b> (du -hH, ls -h, 1595and so on) can thank Elliott Hughes for implementing it. (Our output doesn't 1596exactly match others' because we our "binary" mode will say 1.0G instead of 15971024M, which is a bug in the other one we didn't emulate.)</p> 1598 1599<p>The other big news is <b>nommu support</b>, tested on the new 1600<a href=http://nommu.org/jcore>jcore</a> processor but presumaby working 1601on any nommu system. A few commands don't support nommu yet, but those 1602are disabled by dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK in menuconfig when building 1603for nommu. The roadmap now has a large section analyzing the uClinux 1604project (note that <a href=http://nommu.org>nommu.org</a> is slowly replacing 1605<a href=http://uclinux.org>uclinux.org</a> as the standard repository of 1606all knowledge and wisdom about nommu. The old site <a href=#12-02-2012>contains 1607much that is apocryphal</a>, or at least wildly inaccurate, and the new one 1608is trying to improve on that).</p> 1609 1610<p>Both "make change" and scripts/single.sh (for building standalone commands 1611without the multiplexer logic) now use the top level .config 1612for toybox global settings such as Linux Security Blanket Module selection, 1613(so make defconfig before change now).</p> 1614 1615<p>Documentation updates to the <a href=code.html>code</a> and 1616<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> pages.</p> 1617 1618<h3>pending</h3> 1619 1620<p>In the pending directory Sameer Pradhan added tftp, 1621and Elliott Hughes sent lsof. Isaac Dunham upgraded mdev, 1622reboot, init, login, and modprobe, and fixed a distro-specific build break in 1623scripts/mkflags.h. Elliott Hughes and Lipi Lee made netstat -p handle 1624command lines longer than 21 characters, and Elliott fixed netstat -e and 1625some build warnings. Yeongdeok Suh fixed a warning in dhcpd. 1626I started cleanup on pgrep/pkill.</p> 1627 1628<h3>Command updates, bugfixes, and infrastructure</h3> 1629 1630<p>The multiplexer's "command not found" error exit is now 127, so now you can't 1631distinguish between a command not being found in the multiplexer and 1632the multiplexer itself not being found by the shell, because people wanted 1633that for some reason.</p> 1634 1635<p>Elliott Hughes made date reject invalid dates rather 1636than set the clock to something weird (setting the clock 100 years into the 1637future makes most Linux desktops surprisingly unhappy, and ntpdate won't fix it 1638either), fixed several ls -l display issues (user/group field ordering, 1639make user/group/lsmcontext left aligned), did the aforementioned 1640extensive work on human readable number output, fixed ionice's default 1641class, fixed a mv overwrite bug, made df's columns auto-size, added 1642--ppid and -Z to ps, and teamed up with Daniel K. Levy to fix 1643a segfault in find's handling of -newer -group or -user.</p> 1644 1645<p>Hyejin Kim added stat -c %T support. Colin Cross worked 1646on vmstat fixing 1647a header printing bug and calculating the bi and bo columns in the right 1648units. Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra 1649newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed. 1650Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain 1651pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax. 1652Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows 1653all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p> 1654 1655<p>Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra 1656newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed. 1657Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain 1658pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax. 1659Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows 1660all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p> 1661 1662<p>Two large thinko fixes in oneit: -3 was always enabled (which would 1663eventually block if the child never read the exiting PID numbers from its file 1664descriptor #3 until the pipe filled up), and the signal handlers weren't 1665set up right (for requesting semi-graceful halt/poweroff/reboot). 1666Calling install without a mode is now 0755, and install -g 0 no longer clashes 1667with cp --preserve. Better error message for ls -r on unreadable 1668directories, and ls -Z now uses O_PATH (with the /proc/self/fd/%d 1669workaround for kernel stupidity as necessary).</p> 1670 1671<p>Date now understands @unixtime[.fraction] and uses -D for 1672the set-side format (matching busybox's extension for this). The seq -f 1673string now checks that it's got exactly one %f escape with the correct 1674attributes (and a whole bunch of test cases for it). Fixed a bug 1675in od that screwed up the position indicator on arm and mips. 1676In stat the d/h units moved from %d %D to the default string. 1677And patch can now correctly apply hunks with trailing context to the start of 1678the file.</p> 1679 1680<p>The prompt argument moved out of yesno() (the caller can print the prompt 1681themselves). Replaced toys.exithelp with help_exit(). Added new 1682XVFORK() macro, and xpopen_both() calls /proc/self/exe when passed 1683a NULL argv (see cpio -p for example usage). Replaced toys.recurse 1684with toys.stacktop so the recurse or re-exec decision is now based 1685on bytes of stack space used. Marked a bunch of command-local functions 1686static.</p> 1687 1688<p>New additions to lib/ include strlower(), xconnect(), and the 1689aforementioned help_exit(). 1690The testsuite now has some infrastructure tests based on "example" 1691commands such as toys/examples/test_human_readable.c. 1692The login command finally got a long-overdue cleanup (it's one of the 1693commands that predate the "pending" directory but were part of the reason 1694for it). Hexedit had an 1695uninitialized variable (of course gcc didn't spot it, it was too busy 1696warning about "may be used uninitialized but never actually is" variables).</p> 1697 1698<p>Tweaked makefile so 1699"make CROSS_COMPILE=prefix-" (as well as "CROSS_COMPILE=prefix- make", 1700which still works). Toybox is now installed chmod -w so broken installers 1701(like the bunzip2 package's) that try to overwrite existing binaries won't 1702knock out the whole of toybox. 1703GCC 5.2.0 stopped being able to compile Linux 2.6.12's kconfig, but 1704we added a workaround. You can now build uptime without utmpx.h. 1705Alejandro Joya pointed out that enabling smack required smack on the host 1706as well as target when cross compiling, which is now fixed.</p> 1707 1708<p>Note: toybox can autodetect nommu support when building with a uClibc 1709toolchain 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>, 1710but <a href=http://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>with musl-libc</a> 1711you'll have to enable CONFIG_TOYBOX_MUSL_NOMMU_IS_BROKEN to work around the 1712fact they provide a non-functional fork() implementation that always returns 1713-ENOSYS, to prevent you from compile-time probing for nommu support when 1714cross-compiling. Unfortunately "preventing you from probing" seems to be 1715an explicit policy with musl, they also don't provide an "#ifdef __MUSL__" 1716because their library is perfect and you're only ever allowed to work around 1717other people's bugs, not theirs. So we have to use menuconfig to manually 1718enable musl-specific bug workarounds.</p> 1719 1720<a name="23-07-2015" /><a href="#23-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2015</b></h2></a> 1721<p>I recreated the <a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>0.6.0 source tarball</a> 1722(new sha1sum 08fb1c23f520c25a15f262a8a95ea5b676a98d54) 1723because I forgot to add --prefix to the git archive command when I updated 1724my release script from mercurial, so the files weren't in an enclosing 1725directory. (Ooops.)</p> 1726 1727<a name="19-07-2015" /><a href="#19-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 19, 2015</b></h2></a> 1728<blockquote><p> 1729The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic 1730component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar 1731hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it 1732around in." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy </p></blockquote> 1733 1734<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.0</a> 1735(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.0>git commit</a>) 1736is out. (Yes, git. See the <a href=#05-04-2015>previous news entry</a>.)</p> 1737 1738<p>Sorry for the unusually long gap between releases. Since last release Ye 1739Olde Project Maintainer traveled to japan twice and had two more "once 1740a century" floods at home. (Probably a coincidence.) Still catching up.</p> 1741 1742<h3><b>CELF/ELC talk and Wikipedia[citation needed] article</b></h3> 1743 1744<p>I gave another State Of The Toybox talk 1745(<a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04XwAbtPmAg>video</a> 1746<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2015.txt>outline</a>), in which I 1747repeat my <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#07-11-2013>perennial</a> 1748<a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/557309224535851009>complaint</a> 1749that Wikipedia[citation needed] 1750<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox>still</a> 1751<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#Controversy_over_Toybox>says</a> 1752toybox was relicensed before its hiatus, when relicensing was why 1753the hiatus ended.</p> 1754 1755<p>Since Wikipedia[citation needed] seems unable to do the 1756<a href=#15-11-2011>most</a> 1757<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/log/tip/LICENSE>basic</a> 1758<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011>research</a> on 1759this point, and has stuck to an incorrect sequence of events for years, 1760I've been gradually escalating my attempts to correct them. Toybox 1761came out of mothballs in November 2011 <b>because</b> it could be 1762relicensed. That's what opened up a new niche busybox wasn't already 1763filling with a 10 year headstart.</p> 1764 1765<a name="asterisk_back" /> 1766<p>The article has plenty of smaller issues<a href=#asterisk>*</a>, but 1767given that I gave an entire talk at Ohio LinuxFest in 2013 1768(<a href=http://landley.net/talks/ohio-2013.txt>outline</a>, 1769<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 1770my projects, that one bugs me.</p> 1771 1772<h3><b>New stuff this release</b></h3> 1773 1774<p>There's a new android menu in menuconfig, and rather a lot of Linux 1775Security Module support (Smack for Tizen from Xavier Roche and José Bollo, 1776and SELinux for Android from Elliott Hughes; see 1777the Security Blanket menu under global settings in menuconfig) has 1778trickled in, although there's still more to come.</p> 1779 1780<p><b>New commands:</b> Added reset, nproc, ionice, and iorenice. 1781Elliott Hughes contributed xxd, runcon, 1782restorecon, load_policy, getenforce, setenforce, getprop, and setprop. 1783Promoted shred, nsenter, and hwclock.</p> 1784 1785<p>You can once again build catv now the flag infrastructure's been updated to 1786let it coexist with cat -v. 1787And on a long plane flight I wrote 1788hexedit, an interactive hex editor that implements the start of 1789cursor control infrastructure (for eventual use by less and vi and shell 1790command history and so on).</p> 1791 1792<p><b>New options:</b> Added sed -E as a BSD-compatible synonym for -r. 1793Upgraded oneit with -r (restart), -3 (send exiting PID values to child), 1794and signal handling. Added -v option to timeout, -m to mknod, -u to shred, 1795-t to dmesg, and -123 to head and tail. Added implicit "." to grep -r without 1796any files to work on. Hyejin Kim requested prefix support for truncate -s. 1797Greg Hackman added -inum to find. 1798Jan Cybulski added the smack side of ls -Z support. Various patches also 1799added -Z to mkdir, mknod, and mkfifo. 1800Basic cp --preserve support went in, but not yet the xattr/LSM parts.</p> 1801 1802<p>The toybox command now has a --version option, 1803which uses "git describe" if available.</p> 1804 1805<p><b>Build infrastructure:</b> 1806The "make change" target now saves the output of each failed standalone 1807command build in a .bad file, and "make defconfig" is quieter now.</p> 1808 1809<p>Paul Barker submitted a large patch changing command install paths so 1810"toybox can be installed alongside busybox without confusing 1811update-alternatives". (There's some argument over 1812what the right paths should be, and I'm waiting for 1813people to tell me what else needs fixing because I have no idea. I've 1814been symlinking /bin to /usr/bin since 2002 1815<a href=http://landley.net/writing/hackermonthly-issue022-pg33.pdf>for 1816historical reasons</a>.)</p> 1817 1818<p><b>Docs:</b> The repository link now goes to github, with another link 1819to the commit rss feed.</p> 1820 1821<p>Elliott Hughes updated the Android section of the roadmap 1822(and he would know). Redid bits of scripts/mkstatus.py to make updating 1823status.html easier, and the README is larger.</p> 1824 1825<p>More description of option parsing in code.html, which now describes the 1826FLAG_x macros, switching flag macro sets with FOR_newcommand, how 1827configuration zeroes flag macros and using FORCE_FLAGS to suppress the 1828zeroing of options shared between commands. Also added description of ";" 1829to make --longopts take an optional =value part, and more about TOYBOX_DEBUG 1830to check NEWTOY() option strings (otherwise a bad option string makes 1831lib/args.c obviously segfault, but doesn't explain why).</p> 1832 1833<p>Added a "Why 0BSD?" section to license.html when submitting zero clause bsd 1834to SPDX (according to the pending license spreadsheet, it's been approved for 1835SPDX 2.2).</p> 1836 1837<p>The old list of commands needing cleanup but not in pending was 1838removed from toys/pending/README and instead the issues were added 1839as TODO comments in the individual commands.</p> 1840 1841<p><b>Bugfixes:</b> 1842Fixed mount -a segfaulting without -O (reported by Janus Troelsen), 1843and made it try a "become rw" ioctl() on the block device before falling 1844back to mounting read only (because Android expects that). 1845Fixed printf -- and printf ---. Lots of tweaks to ls -l spacing with 1846different options. Make touch -d and -t actually set time when you don't 1847specify nanoseconds. 1848Fixed a subtle bug where recursive calls (toybox commands that run other 1849toybox commands) weren't resetting all their state. (This manifested as 1850a "no }" error from "find | xargs sed", but could cause other problems.) 1851And David Halls reported another sed bug trying to compile libiconv (which 1852left extra \ at the start of lines in a generated shell script, breaking 1853the build). Output an error message for "cat /mnt".</p> 1854 1855<p>Kylie McClain reported that mktemp broke when $TMPDIR was set to an empty 1856string (which is not the same as unset), that install/find didn't support 1857numeric uid/gids, and that sort -z affects both input and output. 1858Isabella Parakiss fixed a printf.c bug. 1859David Halls fixed bugs in install -D and find -exec. Samuel Holland 1860fixed unshare -r. Hyejin Kim fixed makedevs with a count of 1, fold -w 1861range checking, an error path in scripts/mkflags.c, added -i to dhcpd, 1862and stopped su from prompting the root user for the new user's password. 1863Jan Cybulski spotted wrong indentation when combining ls -s and -i with -C and 1864-x. José Bollo fixed stat %G. Sameer Pradhan fixed a bug in mkfifo -Z.</p> 1865 1866<p>Elliott Hughes asked for a default SIGPIPE handler to disable 1867the signal handler bionic's dynamic loader installs (yes really). Still not 1868100% sure what the correct behavior is there. (Posix is 1869(<a href=http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.standards.posix.austin.general/10915>actively unhelpful</a>, but at least they're taking 1870<a href=http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=789#c1976>years to 1871make up their mind</a>. Elliott also sent patches to fix a typo in 1872useradd.test, add missing arguments to error_exit() calls and clean up 1873printf() format strings, fix an off by one error in human_readable(), 1874fix dmesg -c error reporting, fix a segfault in comma_scan where the option 1875was the last item in optlist (triggered by mount -o ro,remount), fix 1876hwclock -w, made ifconfig print lowercase MAC addresses (it was bothering 1877him), and make terminal_size() read the right environment variable 1878(LINES, not ROWS). And he suggested the test suite notice high command exit 1879values (corresponding to segfault or other signals).</p> 1880 1881<p>People are apparently using toys/pending commands, despite the police tape 1882and flashing lights, so added louder warnings to toys/pending/README. 1883Elliott Hughes fixed various problems with tar, dd, more, and top. 1884Hyejin Kim cleaned up syslogd and dumpleases. Isaac Dunham added hotplug 1885support to mdev. Yeongdeok Suh added RFC-3315 ipv6 support to dhcpd.</p> 1886 1887<p>I rewrote ps.c from scratch (in pending), but it's not ready for real use 1888yet.</p> 1889 1890<p><b>Portability:</b> 1891On the portability front Bernhard Rosenkranzer fixed a problem where the 1892menuconfig code wouldn't compile in C99 mode. (This led to me documenting 1893the craptacular nature of kconfig in a README, and the plan to replace it 1894sometime before 1.0.) Some extra flags to shut up overzealous llvm warnings 1895were added (and have to be probed for because gcc complains about 1896arguments it doesn't recognize even when they switch stuff _off_ using 1897a standard syntax). Don't depend on malloc(0) to return non-null in ls. 1898David Halls fixed some mac/ios portability issues, 1899implying somebody's built at least part of toybox on a mac.</p> 1900 1901<p>Added basename_r() to lib/lib.c because the posix semantics for basename() 1902are stupid but what the gnu guys did to it was appalling. 1903Turns out bionic already had a basename_r(), but posix still doesn't. 1904Fixed it up in portability.h, but this 1905could break more stuff in future. (Correct fix is to lobby posix to add it, 1906which would probably take about 15 years...)</p> 1907 1908<p><b>Infrastructure:</b> 1909The build now checks $LDFLAGS for linker-only flags, and allows the strip 1910command to fail (binflt toolchains provide a strip that doesn't work). 1911Since time.c uses floating point, added TOYBOX_FLOAT dependency in config.</p> 1912 1913<p>There's a lib/lsm.h defining varous inline functions for linux 1914security modules stuff, if (lsm_enabled()) should turn into a compile-time 1915constant 0 and let code drop out when TOYBOX_LSM_NONE selected, but 1916testing against CFG_TOYBOX_LSM_NONE or derived symbols is still useful 1917becuase when it _is_ enabled the probe turns into a system call you 1918don't want to repeat too much.</p> 1919 1920<p>Switched a bunch of commands from signal() to xsignal(). Factored out 1921xgetgrnamid() and xgetpwnamid() into xwrap.c. Make time.c depend on 1922TOYBOX_FLOAT (since it always uses float so shouldn't be available on 1923build targets without even software float). Added readfileat() to lib/lib.c.</p> 1924 1925<p>The dirtree infrastructure now passes in full flags for the old symlink 1926field, and the new DIRTREE_SHUTUP flag disables warnings if a file vanishes 1927out from under you during traverse. New dirtree_start() wrapper to 1928create dirtree root with only two arguments.</p> 1929 1930<p>The not-curses infrastructure introduced by hexedit mostly moved to 1931lib/interestingtimes.c.</p> 1932 1933<a name="asterisk" /> 1934<a href="#asterisk_back" />Asterisk:</a> such when 1935Tim contacted me (my blog says a couple days before nov 13, 2011, I.E. 193611/11/11 not some specific day 2 months later) to ask if I wanted to work 1937on a new project he was proposing called 1938<a href=http://www.elinux.org/Busybox_replacement_project>BentoBox</a> 1939(because I used to do busybox, he'd forgotten toybox existed 1940until I brought it up). And don't ask me what "focuses not on compatibility 1941with its GNU counterparts" means when CP_MORE adds 7 non-posix options 1942and toys/other has 84 commands in neither posix nor LSB. I think they're 1943struggling to explain the difference having dismissed "licensing" as being 1944the reason it started up again after a long hiatus? The reason I don't think 1945GNU is special is there are a half-dozen other independent 1946implementations of the same unix command tools out there (AT&T, 1947BSD, Coherent, Minix, plan 9, busybox, toybox, and several more analyzed in 1948the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a>, and that's ignoring the implementations 1949written for DOS or in assembly over the years). But I do care what 1950Linux From Scratch expects, and if it's 1951<a href=http://archive.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-museum/7.6/LFS-BOOK-7.6-NOCHUNKS.html#ch-tools-gcc-pass1>calling mv -v</a> 1952then I impelement mv -v 1953even if <a href=http://landley.net/toybox/roadmap.html>posix hasn't got 1954it</a>. And I don't know why "gnu counterparts" would describe this when 1955util-linux isn't a gnu package, nor are info-zip, e2fsprogs, kmod, less, 1956procps, shadow, sysklogd, vim, zlib, sudo, dhcpcd...</p> 1957 1958<a name="05-04-2015" /><a href="#05-04-2015"><hr><h2><b>April 5, 2015</b></h2></a> 1959<p>Since <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox/>android</a> and 1960<a href=https://git.tizen.org/cgit/platform/upstream/toybox.git>tizen</a> 1961and <a href=https://github.com/kraj/meta-musl/tree/master/recipes-core/toybox>openembedded</a> 1962and <a href=https://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/toybox>gentoo</a> 1963and so on have all been using Georgi Chorbadzhiyski's git mirror rather 1964than the mercurial repository, I bit the bullet and switched the project's repo 1965<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox>to git</a>. Georgi's 1966<a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>mirror</a> is now pulling from that.</p> 1967 1968<a name="25-02-2015" /><a href="#25-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 25, 2015</b></h2></a> 1969<blockquote><p>"A common mistake that people make when trying to design 1970something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of 1971complete fools."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1972 1973<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.5.2</a> 1974(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1702>commit 1702</a>) is out.</p> 1975 1976<p>New promoted commands: sed (finally fixed enough it builds Linux From 1977Scratch), printf (cleaned up and promoted), shred and 1978base64 (the Tizen guys wanted them), getenforce, setenforce, and chcon (android), 1979mix (promoted with fixes from Isaac Dunham), nsenter (from 1980Andy Lutomirski, merged into unshare).</p> 1981 1982<p>Elliott Hughes submited a bunch of patches to support Android (to 1983both toybox and Bionic libc, which he maintains). On toybox's end this 1984involved a lot of fixups to portability.[ch] and fixes to over a dozen 1985commands, plus several new ones. Other portability fixes included working 1986with buildroot's uclibc fork and building for nommu targets.</p> 1987 1988<p>The new "make change" target builds each toybox command as a standalone 1989binary. Rather a lot of commands that didn't build by themselves (mv depending 1990on cp and so on) were hit with a large rock until they built standalone. 1991This involved rewriting bits of option parsing, more elaborate dependency 1992generation, making each command have its own config 1993symbol and main() function (even when it's just a wrapper calling another 1994command's main()), and so on. Also, some commands can't be built standalone 1995at a conceptual level: "help" describes other enabled commands and "sh" 1996has a number of bulitin commands (cd, exit, set) that require the 1997multiplexer infrastructure, so "make change" filters them out.</p> 1998 1999<p>The mailing list's web archive is still screwed up. Dreamhost has 2000been trying to fix it since approximately September. There are
2001<a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>two</a> 2002<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>other</a> less broken 2003archives, but neither has quite the same UI as mailman.</p> 2004 2005<h3>Bugfixes and tweaks</h3> 2006 2007<p>Cynt Rynt sent in tests for ifconfig, 2008Robert Thompson taught factor to accept whitespace separated arguments, 2009Hyejin Kim pointed out that some of mktemp's longopts were attached to 2010the wrong short options, 2011Luis Felipe Strano Moraes fixed a wrong free() call in bootchartd in pending. 2012Patches from Ashwini Sharma to make "df /dev/node" work, prevent du from 2013looping endlessly following symlinks, and to make expr.c 2014(in pending) understand == and regex matches. (Speaking of expr, it gets 2015priority groupings wrong but the bug was actually in the posix spec's 2016HTML conversion. They fixed the posix spec upstream for us. Still need 2017to fix the expr code, but it's in pending for a reason...)</p> 2018 2019<p>Some commands grew new option flags, such as cp --remove-destination 2020and touch -h.</p> 2021 2022<p>The parallel build has better error reporting now. When toybox needs to 2023re-exec itself to regain suid root permissions and hasn't got the suid bit, 2024it now gives the right error message ("not root" instead of "no such command"). 2025 2026<p>Added a test to "mount" to not mount the same device/directory combination 2027over itself (the OS catches this for block devices, but not for tmpfs). 2028Make blkid distinguish ext3 from ext4. Added catv back into cat (because 2029the Android guys wanted it, and they have historical usage on their side, 2030so...). Handle nanoseconds in touch.</p> 2031 2032<p>Fixed a segfault when CP_MORE was disabled (the resulting option flag list 2033no longer defined -d but still had it in option groups at the end). 2034Workaround for glibc redefining dirname() and basename() to random non-posix 2035semantics because gnu. (They could have created dirname_r() but didn't want 2036to.)</p> 2037 2038<p>Fix an ifconfig test that was preventing assigning an ipv4 address to 2039interface aliases. Several cleanup passes on hwclock but not quite 2040promoted out of pending yet.<p> 2041 2042<p>Fixed a wrong error message in rm (if you had a chmod 000 directory and 2043did rm -r on it without -f, after the prompt it would complain it was a 2044directory, which was not the problem).</p> 2045 2046<p>The gzip compression code now does "store only" output to stdout, for 2047what that's worth.</p> 2048 2049<p>Cleanup mountpoint and expand, and remove them from toys/pending/README 2050(a list of commands that predate the toys/pending directory but needed 2051another pass).</p> 2052 2053<h3>Library and infrastructure:</h3> 2054 2055<p>Reworked the option parsing infrastructure so more commands build 2056standalone (via scripts/single.sh or "make change"). The option flag bit 2057values are no longer packed, it leaves spaces where currently disabled 2058flags go, and you can #define FORCE_FLAGS so disabled flags aren't zeroed. 2059This allows multiple commands to more easily share infrastructure, even if 2060your current flag context is for a disabled command (switched off in config), 2061you can force them to stay on and as long as the flags read the same right 2062to left they'll have the same values.</p> 2063 2064<p>We've started removing use of strncpy() because it's a hugely broken 2065standard C function: the length is the maximum length to _append_, not 2066the size of the destination buffer. It memsets the remaining space it didn't 2067copy ala "memset(dest+strlen(dest), 0, len);" so 2068if you think len is the size of dest you're guaranteed to stomp memory off the 2069end). And if it runs out of space it won't null terminate because reasons. 2070(Meanwhile sprintf("%*s", len, str) is counting wide characters in your current 2071locale, so if you set a locale other than "C" it will also go past your 2072allocated buffer size. Whoever is maintining the C library standards is really 2073bad at strings.) 2074Instead we have xstrncat() which will error_exit() if src+dest+1 doesn't 2075fit in the buffer. (Because randomly truncating input data isn't necessarily 2076an improvement.) And there's always xmprintf().</p> 2077 2078<p>Similarly, strtol() doesn't return an error indicator on overflow, 2079you have to clear and then check errno. So new xstrtol() that cares 2080about overflow.</p> 2081 2082<p>The bionic and musl guys agree faccessat(AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) is not 2083supported, so stop using it.</p> 2084 2085<p>Fixed toy_exec() to detect when argc is in optargs, so we don't 2086need a separate xexec_optargs().</p> 2087 2088<a name="18-02-2015" /><a href="#18-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 18, 2015</b></h2></a> 2089<p>Dreamhost continues to be unable to make mailing list archives work, so 2090here's <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>another 2091list archive</a> with a less awkward interface than gmane.</p> 2092 2093<p>(Neither gives you the convenient historical monthly views of mailman, 2094but I still have hopes dreamhost will someday figure out what they're doing 2095wrong. They've only been trying since October. Last month they did a 2096<a href=http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2015/01/14/discussion-list-hardware-maintenance/>hardware upgrade to fix a software problem</a>, and the stale 2097data loads much faster now, so that's something.)</p> 2098 2099<p>Update (Feb 19): the archive started updating again, by discarding 2100all the pending data. So there are now _two_ giant holes in Dreamhost's 2101web archive, from Dec 15-Jan 3, and then another hole from Jan 16-Feb 18. 2102The relevant messages are in both of the other archives. Here's hoping 2103the chronic archive constipation problem won't happen a sixth time.</p> 2104 2105<a name="30-12-2014" /><a href="#30-12-2014"><hr><h2><b>December 30, 2014</b></h2></a> 2106<p>Due to Dreamhost's <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>ongoing</a> 2107<a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>inability</a> to make mailman 2108work reliably, I've added a link to a backup web archive at 2109<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>gmane</a> to the nav bar 2110on the left.</p> 2111 2112<p>You still subscribe to the list through 2113<a href=http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net>the first link</a>.</p> 2114 2115<p>Update (January 27, 2015): they're <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/558428839462703104>still working on it</a>.</p> 2116 2117<a name="19-11-2014" /><a href="#19-11-2014"><hr><h2><b>November 19, 2014</b></h2></a> 2118 2119<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> 2120 2121<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.1</a> 2122(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1566>commit 1566</a>) is out.</p> 2123 2124<p>It's an interim release, mostly bugfixes. There are several new commands, 2125but they're all in pending.</p> 2126 2127<h3>Development</h3> 2128 2129<p>Finally implemented sed, which is still in pending because although 2130it's feature complete according to posix, and even passes the parts of 2131Busybox's sed test suite that aren't explicitly testing for gnu bugs we 2132don't want to copy, it's not yet good enough to build Linux From Scratch. 2133(The ./configure stages use very long sed scripts. 20 commits worth of 2134implementation and debugging, just under 1000 lines of code, and there's 2135still more to do. We're definitely up to some of the "fiddly" commands now. 2136Did you know "echo hello | sed p - -" segfaults gnu sed in Ubuntu 12.04? 2137Yeah...)</p> 2138 2139<p>Talked with the Tizen developers to follow up on their desire to 2140make toybox a part of the base Tizen system, and got a list of commands 2141to add to the roadmap. The tizen todo list is:</p> 2142 2143<blockquote><p> 2144wget, sha256*, gzip, gunzip, bunzip2, rsync, zdiff*, 2145less, ar, arch, base64, csplit, dir, fmt, join, 2146nproc, shred, shuf, stdbuf, stty, test, tr, unexpand, 2147users, vdir, diff3, sdiff, dosfsck (fsck.vfat), awk, fdisk 2148</p></blockquote> 2149 2150<p>(Most of which was already on the todo list, but it helps prioritize.)</p> 2151 2152<p>Fixed md5sum and sha1sum on big endian systems (reported by James McMechan). 2153Andy Lutomirski fixed unshare's help text and option parsing, 2154and submitted nsenter (a tool to use setns(2)) to pending. 2155Isaac Dunham implemented acpi -ctV options, and spotted the bug that ls -d 2156was inappropraitely following command line symlinks without -H or -L (it 2157should act like ls -l does), and ls -F handles symlinks wrong too. 2158Lukasz Szpakowski sent in two bugfixes to tail.c. Cynt Rynt spotted an 2159unnecessary assignment in lib/password.c.</p> 2160 2161<p>Ashwini Sharma's team was as busy as usual, submitting tr, crontab, and 2162ipcrm, and hwclock to pending, more features to the pending ip.c, and a 2163pile of bugfixes (to chgrp, killall, ifconfig, insmod, 2164losetup, comm, cp, id, xwrap, netcat, modprobe, nohup...) mostly found by 2165static analysis. (These fixes are mostly to seldom-used codepaths like the 2166TOYBOX_FREE config option, but test coverage is always appreciated.) Ashwini 2167also suggested upgrading ln -f to leave the original target alone if link 2168creation fails, and reported that mv -f and -i weren't implemented (now fixed).</p> 2169 2170<p>New config option: TOYBOX_NORECURSE prevents xexec() from making internal 2171function calls (for nommu systems with a finite stack).</p> 2172 2173<p>The "toybox" multiplexer command no longer adds a trailing space to each 2174line of command names, so things like "./toybox | tr ' \n' '|'" to create 2175a grep pattern snippet are easier to do. (Why you'd want to is your business, 2176but the output is tidier now.)</p> 2177 2178<h3>Infrastructure</h3> 2179 2180<p>Isaac Dunham added Android support to portability.h, including compile 2181probes for functions missing from bionic-libc, and annotated the commands that 2182use those functions. We haven't really tested building against bionic, 2183but in theory it's possible now.</p> 2184 2185<p>Running the test suite now color codes the PASS/SKIP/FAIL notifications 2186if output is to a tty. (And in case you missed it last time, VERBOSE=fail 2187to stop at the first failure is really useful.)</p> 2188 2189<p>In loopfiles_rw() use O_CLOEXEC instead of O_RDONLY to request the loop 2190function close filehandles for us. (Otherwise the callback function must 2191close each supplied filehandle itself.)</p> 2192 2193<p>The printf-style escape parsing ("\n" and friends) got factored out into 2194a new unescape() function.</p> 2195 2196<a name="02-10-2014" /><a href="#02-10-2014"><hr><h2><b>October 2, 2014</b></h2></a> 2197<blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. 2198The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss... 2199Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the 2200difficulties." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.<p></blockquote> 2201 2202<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a> 2203(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p> 2204 2205<h3>New commands</h3> 2206 2207<p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands 2208(cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p> 2209 2210<p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now 2211ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth 2212instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving 2213looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to 2214cut, touch, free, and id.</p> 2215 2216<p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini 2217Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded 2218fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code. 2219Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p> 2220 2221<h3>Build infrastructure</h3> 2222 2223<p><b>Parallel builds</b></p> 2224 2225<p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of 2226processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.) 2227Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain 2228about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now 2229gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p> 2230 2231<p><b>Standalone builds</b></p> 2232 2233<p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to 2234build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file 2235selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro 2236for the command. It enables each command's 2237sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build 2238full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when 2239the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro 2240now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY 2241without the NEWTOY</p> 2242 2243<p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that 2244aren't building standalone yet are:</p> 2245 2246<blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos, 2247whoami</p></blockquote> 2248 2249<p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY() 2250entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries 2251that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure 2252is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command 2253is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the 2254code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible 2255to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting 2256design goals in the two contexts.)</p> 2257 2258<p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual 2259commands. 2260 2261<p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p> 2262 2263<p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh 2264containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current 2265configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an 2266exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite 2267got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p> 2268 2269<h3>Internals</h3> 2270 2271<p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking 2272filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now 2273done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added 2274to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now 2275requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false). 2276Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various 2277pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can 2278use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode. 2279Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether 2280we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p> 2281 2282<p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges 2283(which happens when you suid something _other_ than root). 2284The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the 2285command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled), 2286toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse 2287internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth), 2288always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when 2289we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes, 2290dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in 2291error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an 2292option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments 2293saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched 2294off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio. 2295Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall 2296with no arguments (segfaulted).</p> 2297 2298<p><b>Portability</b></p> 2299 2300<p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx 2301to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl 2302maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed 2303instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section 2304to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your 2305build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do 2306a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make 2307it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns 2308requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch 2309to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current 2310musl source control.)</p> 2311 2312<p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have 2313another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p> 2314 2315<p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p> 2316 2317<p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small 2318allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing 2319"$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic 2320is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux 2321filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters 2322we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd), 2323newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in 2324filesystem).</p> 2325 2326<h3>Documentation</h3> 2327 2328<p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html 2329documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently 2330(it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p> 2331 2332<p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup 2333before the pending directory was added.</p> 2334 2335<h3>Test Suite</h3> 2336 2337<p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the 2338testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p> 2339 2340<p>Johan Bergström requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to 2341stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu 2342sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p> 2343 2344<p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat, 2345and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p> 2346 2347<a name="07-07-2014" /><a href="#07-07-2014"><hr><h2><b>July 7, 2014</b></h2></a> 2348<blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: 2349most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many 2350solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely 2351concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd 2352because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were 2353unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2354 2355<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> 2356 2357<p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include: 2358lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs, 2359killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han, 2360sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh, 2361host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p> 2362 2363<p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending): 2364sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5, 2365fallocate, and nbd-client.</p> 2366 2367<p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps, 2368bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd, 2369login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's 2370still more to do on all of those.)</p> 2371 2372<p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against 2373musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't 2374support that target yet.)</p> 2375 2376<p><b>Documentation:</b></p> 2377 2378<p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with 2379a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the 2380"coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show 2381stopper for incoming 2382contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them 2383during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes 2384the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p> 2385 2386<p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the 2387full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p> 2388 2389<p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is 2390a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more 2391elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option 2392parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p> 2393 2394<p><b>Fixes</b>:</p> 2395 2396<p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default 2397output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported 2398bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init() 2399was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound) 2400had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be 2401there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at 2402the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test 2403in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return 2404success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and 2405ferror() from xprintf().</p> 2406 2407<p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff 2408implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some 2409diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from 2410a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops 2411at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set, 2412which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of 2413chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p> 2414 2415<p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final 2416build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of 2417libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p> 2418 2419<p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes, 2420so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities. 2421So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the 2422setup code to setlocale().</p> 2423 2424<p><b>Upgrades:</b></p> 2425 2426<p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it 2427to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also 2428added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database 2429parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p> 2430 2431<p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making 2432it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum 2433for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other 2434implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p> 2435 2436<p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname), 2437the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get 2438a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p> 2439 2440<p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP 2441command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p> 2442 2443<p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always 2444build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p> 2445 2446<p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so 2447we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0 2448filename" actually works again.</p> 2449 2450<p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd, 2451and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill, 2452groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still 2453working to fix them.</p> 2454 2455<p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a 2456dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new 2457generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte 2458to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's 2459initialized to in toy_init).</p> 2460 2461<p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and 2462use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro 2463contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs 2464decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion 2465bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you 2466cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the 2467first one, the build break is now more informative).</p> 2468 2469<a name="20-04-2014" /><a href="#20-04-2014"><hr><h2><b>April 20, 2014</b></h2></a> 2470<blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer 2471which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks 2472had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as 2473far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to 2474turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2475 2476<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on 2477<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And 2478about time too.</p> 2479 2480<p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h, 2481that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text 2482from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines. 2483There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p> 2484 2485<p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the 2486way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the 2487<a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk, 2488Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p> 2489 2490<p><b>In pending:</b> 2491Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more, 2492groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added 2493ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty. 2494Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold. 2495I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in 2496compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side) 2497and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p> 2498 2499<p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot, 2500cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus 2501in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some 2502work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations 2503documented what their output actually meant).</p> 2504 2505<p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to 2506handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the 2507fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h 2508options (all commands, html output). 2509Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually 2510set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross 2511compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween 2512sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code. 2513Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options 2514to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and 2515allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded 2516tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after 2517that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting. 2518Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of 2519pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified 2520find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on 2521the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions 2522now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with 2523aliasing.</p> 2524 2525<p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you 2526can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same 2527.c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the 2528bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example. 2529i 2530<p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers 2531not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h 2532was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc 2533configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p> 2534 2535<p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig 2536build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily 2537the absolute latest build environment.)</p> 2538 2539<p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid(). 2540xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd 2541and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command, 2542get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and 2543xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into 2544bzcat.c.</p> 2545 2546<p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the 2547help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output. 2548The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about 2549#including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The 2550<a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading 2551of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for 2552good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion 2553at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p> 2554 2555<a name="18-11-2013" /><a href="#18-11-2013"><hr><h2><b>November 18, 2013</b></h2></a> 2556<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." - 2557The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2558 2559<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.7.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.7</a> is based on 2560<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p> 2561 2562<p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted 2563reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from 2564pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some 2565cleanup.</p> 2566 2567<p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going 2568into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted 2569dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and 2570an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p> 2571 2572<p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer 2573added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem. 2574William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input 2575(the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug 2576where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault). 2577I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using 2578the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a 2579synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with 2580$CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted 2581a typo in the web page.</p> 2582 2583<p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from 2584bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by 2585--longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal 2586querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a 2587debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply). 2588The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and 2589micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite 2590now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p> 2591 2592<a name="17-09-2013" /><a href="#17-09-2013"><hr><h2><b>September 17, 2013</b></h2></a> 2593<blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number." 2594Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway 2595station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function, 2596and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 2597</blockquote> 2598 2599<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on 2600<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p> 2601 2602<p>This release adds 2603several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han 2604submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and 2605a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted 2606acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p> 2607 2608<p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker). 2609The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah" 2610instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in. 2611Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain 2612other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who 2613heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID 2614namespace support.</p> 2615 2616<h3>Pending</h3> 2617 2618<p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should 2619probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd, 2620dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from 2621Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet), 2622syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar, 2623test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E. 2624M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p> 2625 2626<p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't 2627ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig 2628and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up 2629logger and syslogd...</p> 2630 2631<p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory, 2632but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du, 2633expand, and touch.</p> 2634 2635<h3>Infrastructure</h3> 2636 2637<p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the 2638multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes, 2639OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a 2640command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If 2641you're curious, you can do:</p> 2642 2643<blockquote><pre> 2644make defconfig 2645make 2646mkdir singles 2647for i in $(./toybox) 2648do 2649 echo $i 2650 PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break 2651done 2652</pre> 2653<p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p> 2654</blockquote> 2655 2656<p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this 2657time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p> 2658 2659<p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions 2660not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains 2661functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit). 2662This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p> 2663 2664<p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude 2665logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts 2666should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ; 2667option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E. 2668--color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p> 2669 2670<p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf 2671does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it 2672for us".</p> 2673 2674<p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid(). 2675It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite 2676so much anymore.</p> 2677 2678<p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly 2679linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are 2680using it now.</p> 2681 2682<p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag 2683(-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables) 2684that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept 2685into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler, 2686"-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p> 2687 2688<h3>Bugfixes</h3> 2689 2690<p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to 2691finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f 2692someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once). 2693Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p> 2694 2695<p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that 2696python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks 2697for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer 2698then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p> 2699 2700<p>Ashwini Sharma 2701pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some 2702configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p> 2703 2704<p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and 2705a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p> 2706 2707<p>The new function xexec_optargs() 2708replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs 2709during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p> 2710 2711<p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which 2712didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup 2713between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh 2714command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p> 2715 2716<p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't 2717delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm 2718should now be fixed.</p> 2719 2720<p> 2721<a name="26-07-2013" /><a href="#26-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 26, 2013</b></h2></a> 2722<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git 2723mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the 2724mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches 2725against it and post them to the list.</p> 2726 2727<a name="02-07-2013" /><a href="#02-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 2, 2013</b></h2></a> 2728<blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You 2729should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people 2730like you." - 2731The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2732 2733<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on 2734<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds 2735uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by 2736default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and 2737enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups". 2738Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv". 2739</p> 2740 2741<p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and 2742each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help" 2743and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p> 2744 2745<p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client, 2746logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup. 2747Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up. 2748(It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p> 2749 2750<p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach 2751more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The 2752<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis 2753of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p> 2754 2755<p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected, 2756condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught 2757-l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices. 2758Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking), 2759and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no 2760corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work). 2761Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham 2762fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output 2763field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means 2764to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda 2765moved file permission display code to lib so ls and 2766stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the 2767last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it 2768(ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user). 2769</p> 2770 2771<p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global 2772variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc 2773debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and 2774that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of 2775just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking 2776against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes 2777for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes 2778various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical 2779(breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names). 2780 2781<p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build 2782system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The 2783release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control. 2784Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p> 2785</p> 2786 2787<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 2788BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first 2789paragraph now says:</p> 2790 2791<blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this 2792software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote> 2793 2794<p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this 2795permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all 2796copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects 2797that 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 2798both 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 2799less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate 2800the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p> 2801 2802<p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more 2803or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it 2804BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p> 2805 2806<a name="21-03-2013" /><a href="#21-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 21, 2013</b></h2></a> 2807<p>Video of my ELC talk 2808"<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>" 2809is up on youtube. Related materials include the 2810<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an 2811<a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p> 2812 2813<p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about 2814the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p> 2815 2816<ul> 2817<li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li> 2818 <ul> 2819 <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li> 2820 <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li> 2821 </ul> 2822<li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li> 2823 <ul> 2824 <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li> 2825 </ul> 2826<li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li> 2827<li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li> 2828<li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li> 2829 <ul> 2830 <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li> 2831 <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li> 2832 <ul> 2833 <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li> 2834 <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li> 2835 </ul> 2836 </ul> 2837</ul> 2838</span> 2839 2840 2841<a name="14-03-2013" /><a href="#14-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 14, 2013</b></h2></a> 2842<blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." - 2843The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2844 2845<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on 2846<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding 2847the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p> 2848 2849<p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes 2850getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds. 2851"id -Gn root" should now print root's groups 2852instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under 2853Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you 2854can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p> 2855 2856<p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending". 2857Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig. 2858Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig 2859should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p> 2860 2861<p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries 2862(klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p> 2863 2864<a name="18-01-2013" /><a href="#18-01-2013"><hr><h2><b>January 18, 2013</b></h2></a> 2865<blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2866 2867<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on 2868<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There 2869are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the 2870<a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p> 2871 2872<p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s 2873and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to 2874kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite. 2875Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p> 2876 2877<p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and 2878readlink commands. The segfault in ls 2879happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the 2880default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an 2881extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing 2882a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath() 2883code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test 2884suite checks for it).</p> 2885 2886<p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the 2887error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's 2888still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error 2889bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That 2890means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right 2891error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.) 2892Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG 2893doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with 2894at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic 2895(and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma). 2896dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree 2897functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using 2898libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means 2899it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p> 2900 2901<p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that 2902disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back 2903to -Os by default now.</p> 2904 2905<a name="15-12-2012" /><a href="#15-12-2012"><hr><h2><b>December 15, 2012</b></h2></a> 2906<blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a 2907thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly 2908go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." 2909</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2910 2911<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on 2912<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is 2913just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal 2914Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's 2915a new stable version.</p> 2916 2917<p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch 2918(from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a 2919bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8 2920support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option. 2921Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof. 2922The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports 2923-fenq.</p> 2924 2925<p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library, 2926and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel 2927features we depend on start to drop out).</p> 2928 2929<p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per 2930level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more 2931than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out, 2932or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an 2933earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README, 2934the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory 2935(so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p> 2936 2937<p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist(). 2938Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with 2939full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to 2940stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing 2941it).</p> 2942 2943<p>The open group broke their website so the 2944<a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008 2945now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with 2946pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while 2947I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p> 2948 2949<p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant 2950because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current 2951implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option 2952to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks, 2953but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024 2954filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p> 2955 2956<a name="13-11-2012" /><a href="#13-11-2012"><hr><h2><b>November 13, 2012</b></h2></a> 2957<blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins." 2958- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2959 2960<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on 2961<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p> 2962 2963<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and 2964Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and 2965md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix, 2966unix2dos).</p> 2967 2968<p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by 2969default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name. 2970Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p> 2971 2972<p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into 2973"posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008, 2974the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig 2975and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on). 2976An android directory is planned (see the updated 2977<a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p> 2978 2979<p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's 2980global block are now automatically generated, commands should 2981#define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that 2982command.</p> 2983 2984<p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and - 2985in them, such as switch_root.</p> 2986 2987<p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of 2988uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers. 2989The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite 2990properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's 2991fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage 2992calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp 2993and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces 2994break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite 2995properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's 2996fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib 2997fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary 2998on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending 2999on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in 3000a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking
3001partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts: 3002this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it 3003wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite 3004some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to 3005successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc 3006versions was added to portability.h.</p> 3007 3008<p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a 3009rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All 3010the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards 3011document, where applicable.</p> 3012 3013<p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into 3014a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p> 3015 3016<p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're 3017back now.</p> 3018</span> 3019 3020<a name="23-07-2012" /><a href="#23-07-2012"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2012</b></h2></a> 3021<blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys 3022out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked 3023out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 3024 3025<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on 3026<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p> 3027 3028<p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from 3029the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p> 3030 3031<p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed 3032taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han 3033contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a 3034case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p> 3035 3036<p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the 3037<a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and 3038<a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option 3039to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime), 3040fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the 3041corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding 3042glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing 3043pending output on exit.</p> 3044 3045<a name="25-06-2012" /><a href="#25-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 25, 2012</b></h2></a> 3046<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> 3047 3048<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit 3049<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's 3050mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than 3051x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which 3052now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test 3053suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the 3054musl libc.</p> 3055 3056<p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here 3057it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40 3058pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p> 3059</span> 3060 3061<a name="12-06-2012" /><a href="#12-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 12, 2012</b></h2></a> 3062<blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that 3063he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the 3064wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was 3065muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had 3066always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely 3067the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 3068 3069<p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>, 3070so here it is, based 3071on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the 3072statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should 3073actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting 3074that).</p> 3075 3076<p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development 3077doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course. 3078The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which 3079threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit 3080more frequent from here on.</p> 3081 3082<p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory 3083tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that 3084which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p> 3085 3086<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown, 3087chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if 3088you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug 3089on slackware.</p> 3090 3091<p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and 3092mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint, 3093vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups. 3094Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p> 3095 3096<p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell 3097wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove 3098deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and 3099musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got 3100some cleanups and bugfixes.</p> 3101 3102<p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not 3103to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's 3104problematic).</p> 3105 3106<p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now, 3107yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the 3108SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox 3109multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer 3110segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full 3111posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next 3112release.)</p> 3113 3114<p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros 3115for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue 3116is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p> 3117 3118<p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built 3119Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that 3120'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing. 3121(The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted 3122yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before 31231.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p> 3124 3125 3126<a name="03-03-2012" /><a href="#03-03-2012"><hr><h2><b>March 3, 2012</b></h2></a> 3127 3128<blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral 3129without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them. 3130Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking 3131for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p> 3132</p></blockquote> 3133 3134<p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based 3135on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>. This 3136time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt 3137binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p> 3138 3139<p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I 3140have not quite been keeping up.)</p> 3141 3142<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod, 3143insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename. Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln, 3144realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall. Daniel 3145Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests 3146for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp. 3147Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed 3148cross compiling to work more reliably.</p> 3149 3150<p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's 3151code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new 3152code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python 3153bloat-o-meter.)</p> 3154 3155<p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from 3156Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott, 3157more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano 3158Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and 3159optimizations.</p> 3160 3161<p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link, 3162dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months 3163and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p> 3164 3165 3166<a name="12-02-2012" /><a href="#12-02-2012"><hr><h2><b>February 12, 2012</b></h2></a> 3167<blockquote><p> 3168"for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at 3169least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two 3170important respects..."</p> 3171<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 3172 3173<p>Here's the first BSD licensed release, 3174<a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization 3175point than anything particularly useful. 47 commands in a reasonably 3176ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially 3177finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several 3178patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p> 3179 3180<p>More to come...</p> 3181 3182<hr> 3183<a name="15-11-2011" /><a href="#15-11-2011"><hr><h2><b>November 15, 2011</b></h2></a> 3184- Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2 3185clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line 3186implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p> 3187 3188<p>More to come...</p> 3189 3190<hr> 3191 3192<p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p> 3193 3194<!--#include file="footer.html" --> 3195