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   4<p>Toybox combines the most common Linux command line utilities together
   5into a single BSD-licensed executable that's simple, small, fast,
   6reasonably standards-compliant, and powerful enough to turn Android into
   7a development environment. See the links on the left for details.</p>
   8
   9<h2>News</h2>
  10
  11<a name="12-08-2022" /><a href="#12-08-2022"><hr><h2><b>August 12, 2022</b></h2></a>
  12<blockquote><p>
  13Huge as office blocks, silent as birds. They hung in the air exactly the same
  14way that bricks don't.</p>
  15<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
  16</p></blockquote>
  17
  18<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.8.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.8</a>
  19(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.8>git commit</a>)
  20is out, with prebuilt <a href=downloads/binaries/0.8.8>static binaries</a> and
  21<a href=downloads/binaries/mkroot/0.8.8>mkroot images</a>
  22bootable under QEMU (built using vanilla linux-5.19).</p>
  23
  24<p>No new or promoted commands this time. (Time based releases mean NOT
  25holding the release to wait for things like that.)</p>
  26
  27<p>Thanks to Google for sponsoring the project's maintainer to focus on toybox
  28for a while. (They want a hermetic build, I want Android to build under
  29Android. Working on it...)</p>
  30
  31<p><u>Features</u>:
  32The new <b>timeout -i</b> option kills a command for inactivity (output
  33to stdout resets the timer).
  34Basic support for <b>tar --xform</b> (but not yet the special tar-only s///x
  35options).
  36--long options now support unambigous abbrevations by default, so you can
  37go "ls --col" and it'll figure out you mean --color.
  38Added <b>blkid -o</b> understanding "full", "value", and "export" output
  39formats. Added <b>nsenter -C</b> (cgroup namespace) and <b>-a</b> (enable all
  40supported namespaces).
  41Added <b>mount -R</b> and switched the bind mount default to be recursive
  42(it still autodetects --bind and --loop mounts based on the source/target type,
  43all --bind or --rbind do is switch the recursive flag on and off).</p>
  44
  45<p>Elliott implemented <b>tar --null</b>,
  46and taught <b>file</b> to recognize some Linux kernel images, and
  47binaries for Linux's <a href=https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/fa96b57c1490>newly merged</a>
  48arch/loongarch (a <a href=https://linleygroup.com/newsletters/newsletter_detail.php?num=4623>mips64 variant</a>
  49from <a href=https://phoronix.com/news/LoongArch-MIPS-Copy-Kernel>china</a>).</p>
  50
  51<p><u>Bugfixes</u>:
  52Several cleanups to taskset, mostly due to reviewing it before making
  53an explainer video, but the review found an inappropriate use of
  54TOYFLAG_STAYROOT that got fixed.
  55Argument parsing for <b>unshare</b> and <b>nsenter</b> should now match
  56debian's (I.E. "unshare -npu" works the same as "unshare -n -p -u" not
  57"unshare --net=pu").
  58<b>kill 1</b> no longer says "unknown pid 1: not permitted" (it
  59says "bad pid" like everywhere else).
  60<b>test -x</b> and friends now test live access, not permission bits.
  61(Root ignores a lot of permissions, chmod u-x blocks you from executing your
  62own file even if g+x and o+x should let you access it, things like selinux can
  63further break the unix permission model, etc).
  64
  65<p>In lib/ a fencepost error in <b>chomp()</b> could read one byte past the start of the string, and
  66<b>xpclose_both()</b> no longer closes the parent's stdin and stdout
  67when they're explicitly passed through to the child.
  68In scripts/runtest.sh, moving tests into subshells broke failure reporting with VERBOSE=all.
  69While "make install" was creating directories when $PREFIX pointed to a
  70nonexistent directory, "make toybox" didn't even though it tried to place the
  71output file there.</p>
  72
  73<p>James Farrell switched the test suite from detecting root via $UID to
  74$(id -u). (It's not a security issue, this just controls which tests we attempt.
  75It's another workaround for missing features in mksh.)
  76Taolaw spotted that httpd could segfault when xabspath() returns NULL
  77(for error conditions such as infinitely looping symlinks
  78or "." not resolving when the current directory was deleted).</p>
  79
  80<p><u>Documentation</u>:
  81We <a href=design.html>recorded</a> the
  82move from C99 to the C11 standard, which was actually made a while ago:
  83the typecast constants we've
  84been using for a while are a 2011 feature not available in the 1999 edition
  85of the C standard. (This came up when we had to move to C11's "_Noreturn" to work around a compiler bug in llvm.
  86Yes __attribute__((__noreturn__)) should be identical, that's the bug part.)</p>
  87
  88<p>The website's nav bar got updated (among other things, linking to
  89our <a href=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4VFy3wc1nzq5tUHhiti6fw>youtube
  90channel</a>), and the FAQ entry on cross compiling got
  91expanded.
  92The toys/example commands moved from "make list" to "make list_example"
  93(since they're not enabled in defconfig either).
  94The cross compiling example command line in "make help" now sets
  95LDFLAGS=--static instead of putting that in CFLAGS.</p>
  96
  97<p>The web archive is back, and since the missing messages were
  98never delivered (the mailserver trying to deliver them timed out and bounced
  99them back after a couple days) this means unlike previous failures the web
 100archive isn't out of sync with reality: the hole was the list actually being
 101down until Dreamhost tech support figured out what they broke this time.</p>
 102
 103<p><u>Pending</u>:
 104More work on toysh: case/esac was confused by nested flow control blocks,
 105support for [[ &lt; &gt; =~ ]] tests, implemented the rest of the $((math))
 106operators and support for ((math)) tests and "for ((math;math;math))" loops,
 107and so on. (The next toysh goal is to get the test suite running under mkroot, but
 108other stuff keeps coming up.)
 109James Farrell upgraded diff, adding three line format options and support
 110for diffing FIFOs.
 111Rob did several rounds of dd cleanup, then got distracted by diff cleanup
 112which turned into a complete rewrite of diff.
 113Neither was ready to promote in time for this release though (although the release
 114got delayed almost a week before Rob admitted that).</p>
 115
 116<p><u>Library</u>:
 117The <b>lib/args.c</b> command line parser now has two optional modifiers
 118(" " and ";") for each argument type, providing 4 combinations (both unset,
 119both set, one of each set), and all 4 now have defined semantics and
 120tests/skeleton.test exercises them. (This was motivated by <b>unshare</b>
 121needing a new combination to match the debian behavior.)
 122<b>lib/args.c</b> also added "~" to collate bare longopts (so multiple bare
 123longopts can be synonyms setting the same flag or argument variable).</p>
 124
 125<p>New function <b>xrunread()</b> which launches a child function, writes a
 126string to its stdin, and returns everything the child wrote to stdout as another
 127string (or NULL if it couldn't run or exited with an error), leaving
 128stderr alone (so it goes to the same place the parent's goes).</p>
 129
 130<p>New functions <b>same_file()</b> and <b>same_def_ino()</b> to simplify
 131file metadata comparisons. (If you're wondering why something so simple should
 132have a function encapsulating the logic, this release also has at least 3
 133different bugfix commits for thinkos from switching all the commands over
 134to use them instead of doing the test ourselves. All missing/extra ! or
 135&& vs || level stuff.)</p>
 136
 137<p>The <b>exit_signal()</b> handler now blocks signals so <b>sigatexit()</b> won't
 138re-enter the list when it receives two different killer signals. (Since
 139<b>xexit()</b> capture uses siglongjmp() this should clean itself up
 140when not actually exiting.)</p>
 141
 142<p><u>Plumbing</u>:
 143Several warning suppressions due to things like llvm's fortify finding
 144false positives, gcc's "int and long are identical on 32 bits!" warnings
 145(yes... they are), the MacOS build being crotchety about vfork()... All verified
 146non-issues at present.</p>
 147
 148<p>The build plumbing now puts more effort into resolving dependencies and figuring
 149out when stuff needs to be rebuilt. This includes noticing when the
 150toolchain we're building with changes flags, and outputting a warning
 151when it detects the need to run "make oldconfig" again. (At the moment
 152calling kconfig/ from scripts/ would be a layering violation: I need to
 153rewrite kconfig from scratch before it can do that automatically.).</p>
 154
 155<p>Removed most compile time probes from <b>scripts/genconfig.sh</b>,
 156replaced with things like #ifdef (_NR_syscall) and
 157#if __has_include(&lt;utmpx.h&gt;), or acknowledging when a probe is a bug
 158workaround for a specific libc version and testing for that instead,
 159plus simply deleting some config options due to the 7 year horizon expiring
 160so we can trust it to be there now.</p>
 161
 162<p>Usual batch of musl workarounds for behavior that
 163<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/9a5d7a063c8c>doesn't match</a>
 164glibc and bionic or where they've been
 165<a href=https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2022/07/27/5>arguing about</a>
 166stuff for years without actually fixing it.
 167Ed Maste of FreeBSD added some FreeBSD checks/cases to
 168lib/portability.[hc], mostly in places we already supported Apple or
 169OpenBSD.
 170The top level "configure" is now re-entrant (shouldn't append stuff
 171to enviornment varibles like $CFLAGS twice when read twice).
 172The MacOS defconfig now includes a lot more commands.</p>
 173
 174<p><u>Test suite</u>:
 175The diff for failing tests is now output after the FAIL line instead
 176of before, "make tests" now runs tar.test by default,
 177a new skeleton.test uses toys/example/skeleton.c to exercise the
 178lib/args.c command line parsing plumbing,
 179scripts/runtest.sh now uses do_pass and do_fail consistently,
 180and Rob keeps accidentally checking in bashisms and Elliott keeps submitting
 181patches to remove them because android runs the tests under mksh and
 182toysh isn't ready yet.</p>
 183
 184<p>Work in progress to make TEST_HOST=1 pass on newer debian, which is a moving
 185target. (The tests didn't change, but the behavior of the gnu utilities
 186is not consistent. Or standardized. Or coherent. Or predictable. Or sane.)
 187Some minor changes to commands like <b>xxd</b> and <b>cmp</b> to
 188make their output look more like what debian's currently producing.</p>
 189
 190<p>Making the tests pass on MacOS is harder: that calls group 0 "wheel"
 191instead of "root" (so things like "tar.test" don't get the same result),
 192stuff like "du" or "ls" often cares what filesystem you're mounted on
 193(and MacOS hasn't even got the same ones _available_), 
 194and we even found a mac kernel bug where extending a sparse
 195file sparsely allocates the previous length as actual zeroed disk space
 196(ala "truncate -s 3m file; truncate -s 5m file; du file" says it's using
 1973 megabytes of disk space). There's probably more but
 198that's where we stopped looking for now: since Rob doesn't have a mac
 199to test on and the github tests don't reliably run when new commits are
 200pushed (skipped when the servers are busy), fixing this hasn't
 201been a priority. Lots of little red X in the github history because of this,
 202though...</p>
 203
 204<p><u>Mkroot</u>:
 205The output file names are now consistent across architectures: each
 206root/$TARGET directory now contains an <b>fs</b> subdirectory with the
 207expanded root filesystem, packaged into <b>initramfs.cpio.gz</b>,
 208a <b>linux-kernel</b> built from <b>linux-fullconfig</b> which is built
 209from <b>linux-miniconfig</b>, and a <b>run-qemu.sh</b> script to launch
 210it under qemu. No more architecture name in the filenames (that's what
 211the directory name is for), and no more "bzImage" or "vmlinux" depending
 212on what filename the kernel build produced.</p>
 213
 214<p>The fs/init script has better chroot support (not warning about /dev/shm and
 215/dev/pts already existing).
 216The airlock build no longer includes ftpd (you can use
 217httpd and wget, scp out of dropbear, mount a network filesystem from the
 218host, or if you really want to still use ftp can match ftpget and ftpput).
 219When mkroot is downloading extra packages (for example in the dropbear build),
 220it falls back to the host wget if it can't fetch with toybox's version.
 221(This is because toybox hasn't got built-in https support yet, it's on the
 222todo list.)
 223Updated the dropbear build to the current version and fixed a compiler
 224path issue.
 225Fixed version skew in the <a href=http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2110.3/00278.html>workaround</a>
 226so the Linux kernel build doesn't require a third ELF package (but only
 227for x86, not for any other architecture).</p>
 228
 229<a name="23-07-2022" /><a href="#23-07-2022"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2022</b></h2></a>
 230<p>Sorry the mailing list has been down since the 19th, Dreamhost
 231<a href=https://landley.net/notes-2022.html#22-07-2022>happened
 232again</a>. (First the web archive was empty, then it was down, then it was
 233restored from a backup taken before the "upgrade" but was not updating with
 234new messages, which they denied was an actual problem but now timeout bounce
 235messages from all the attempts to send to it since it broke have started
 236coming back saying a path doesn't exist on their server...)</p>
 237
 238<p>Dreamhost tech support has been informed of the issue a half-dozen times,
 239and did at least replace the "Currently there are no messages" page with a
 240backup from before they broke it on the first day. Unfortunately they have yet
 241to acknowledge anything else is wrong with it since then, and don't seem to
 242have support staff working over the weekend. This used to be an
 243<a href=https://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>annual</a>
 244<a href=https://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>event</a> for them,
 245but they hadn't done a truly major breakage in
 246<a href=#12-21-2015>a while</a>. I _think_ the 11 month gap that last link
 247mentions is still missing, but the server's down again (or at least timing
 248out) so I can't check.</p>
 249</span>
 250
 251<a name="06-05-2022" /><a href="#06-05-2022"><hr><h2><b>May 6, 2022</b></h2></a>
 252<blockquote><p>
 253The mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and
 254finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which
 255happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale
 256the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.</p>
 257<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
 258
 259<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.7.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.7</a>
 260(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.7>git commit</a>)
 261is out, with prebuilt <a href=downloads/binaries/0.8.7>static binaries</a> and
 262<a href=downloads/binaries/mkroot/0.8.7>mkroot images</a>
 263bootable under QEMU (using vanilla linux-5.17).</p>
 264
 265<p>Rob also <a href=downloads/binaries/toolchains/latest>uploaded</a>
 266the prebuilt binary cross and native compilers used to build those
 267mkroot images (there's a <a href=downloads/binaries/toolchains/latest/README>README</a>
 268in there), and started producing
 269<a href=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4VFy3wc1nzq5tUHhiti6fw>tutorial videos</a> explaining the
 270toybox commands, their implementation, toybox's infrastructure...</p>
 271
 272<p>The commands <b>host</b>, <b>wget</b>, <b>openvt</b>, and
 273<b>deallocvt</b> were cleaned up and promoted.
 274Elliott contributed the new commands <b>uclampset</b>, <b>gpiodetect</b>,
 275<b>gpioinfo</b>, <b>gpioiget</b>, <b>gpiofind</b>, and <b>gpioset</b>,
 276and Rob wrote a simple <b>httpd</b> (largely to give wget.test something to
 277talk to).</p>
 278
 279<p>One command was removed: <b>catv</b> didn't really serve a purpose
 280(everybody just uses <b>cat -v</b>).</p>
 281
 282
 283
 284
 285<p><u>Features</u>:
 286<b>top</b> can now move the list with the LEFT/RIGHT cursor keys (changing the
 287sort field is now SHIFT LEFT/RIGHT). Added <b>find -samefile</b>,
 288<b>cmp -n</b> (and wired up skip1 skip2),
 289<b>tar --strip components</b> (and tar --owner and --group can now specify :UID and :GID making tar.test more portable),
 290<b>lsusb</b> and </b>lspci</b> now read /etc/{usb,pci}.ids[.gz] (when
 291available) to provide human readable device descriptions,
 292<b>ifconfig</b> can now rename interfaces.
 293Moritz Weber added <b>wget</b> post support for form data.
 294In toysh, <b>cd</b> got updated ("cd -" jumps to $OLDPWD,
 295and cd can now handle deleted directories).</p>
 296
 297<p><u>Bugfixes</u>:
 298<b>cp --preserve xattr,context</b> work together now, and
 299Dario Freni fixed <b>cp --xattr</b> to avoid copying selinux context.
 300The <b>sort -u</b> option now implies -s, <b>wget -O -</b> now writes to stdout,
 301<b>pwget -B</b> removes more characters other implementations don't emit,
 302</b>time</b>'s realtime output was not properly zero padding the fractional
 303part, and <b>sed</b> now works with multiple w to the same file.
 304Fixed <b>nl -E</b>, <b>realpath -e</b>, <b>find</b> -newerXY and @time.nanosecond parsing,
 305Various <b>sh</b> (it handles ${X: -1:1} properly now,
 306which is not the same as ${X:-1:1} because :- has special meaning).
 307The <b>hello</b> command in the examples directory now wait for a keypress before
 308exiting when run as PID 1 (because calling wait() returned "No child process"
 309immediately.)
 310The multiplexer's <b>toybox command --help</b> once again shows the command's
 311help (not toybox --help).
 312Elliott fixed a strip bug in the MacOS build, taught <b>file</b> not to be confused
 313by ELF BSS sections but to otherwise detect more invalid ELF files,
 314and fixed an <b>xargs</b> bug where stdin was inappropriately O_CLOEXEC.
 315Github user hg42 reported a bug where <b>tar</b> was looping trying to remove ".."
 316at the start of names.</p>
 317
 318<p><u>Library</u>:
 319Taught flags.h to #define its own CLEANUP macros so switching FLAG()
 320contexts requires fewer steps.
 321When args.c is just enforcing max/min argument count but collecting no
 322options, imply "?" so "command -123" isn't an unknown option.
 323Moved lib/help.c into main.c (nothing else in lib/ had to rebuild
 324when the config changes which commands are enabled).
 325The remains of linestack.c were renamed utf8.c, and
 326toys.h now includes sys/syscall.h so commands don't have to.</p>
 327
 328<p>Yank things with only one remaining user: moved get_line()
 329to patch.c, struct str_len to bc.c, and struct ptr_len to ps.c
 330Removed tty_esc() and tty_jump() wrappers.
 331Various cleanups to lib/password.c and lib/tty.c.
 332Removed the PEDANTIC_ARGS config option which just set a macro that was never
 333used, xsignal_all_killers() now takes SIG_DFL as the reset value instead
 334of explicitly checking for NULL,
 335chomp() now removes any number of trailing \r\n, and it's now safe to
 336llist_pop(0) just like dlist_pop(0).
 337LongPing Wei improved support for copy_file_range().</p>
 338
 339<p><u>Build</u>:
 340If you don't set $PREFIX, <b>make install</b> now defaults to $PWD/install
 341(which does not require root access to write to, and you can tar up your
 342pile of symlinks from there).
 343More command sub-options removed (NETCAT_LISTEN and CAT_V).</p>
 344
 345<p>Some of the uglier scripts/make.sh plumbing moved into scripts/portability.sh
 346(which should now be safe to source twice),
 347and moved almost all config varible definitions to "configure" now. The
 348new $GENDIR variable theoretically lets the "generated" directory live
 349somewhere else (not very tested yet).
 350Various tweaks to scripts/make.sh to try to avoid unnecessary rebuilds
 351and library probes when toolchain and config haven't changed.
 352Added -Wno-pointer-sign to $CFLAGS because passing an unsigned char * to a
 353function that expects char * is not a problem.
 354
 355<p>The airlock install in scripts/install.sh had the $PENDING items sorted
 356into "started" and "not started". Add git and bash to $PENDING (used
 357out of $PATH by --version and the powerpc64le build, respectively).</p>
 358
 359<p><u>Cleanup</u>:
 360Removed the lib/linestack.c plumbing (which was never finished and hadn't
 361been touched in years).
 362Merged lspci.c into lsusb.c (so they can share config file reading
 363infrastructure), and merged chvt/deallocvt into openvt.c.
 364Minor cleanups to ping, fsync, ionice, pmap, truncate, timeout, tty,
 365factor, mount.
 366Went through and replaced \033 with \e in strings (since clang supports
 367it and \033 is just awkward). Added LL to constant 0 in the FLAG macros
 368to prevent gcc from warning that 0<<32 might produce 0.
 369Moved llvm's -Wno-string-plus-int into configure instead of probing
 370for it, since gcc no longer dies when asked to suppress an unknown warning.</p>
 371
 372<p><u>mkroot</u>:
 373the ANSI escape to undo QEMU's wordwrap bug is now in both the init script
 374and launch wrapper script (so wordwrap isn't broken while running the
 375emulated system, nor if the emulated system fails to run).
 376If devtmpfs was already mounted on /dev, we still need to create dev/pts.
 377The init script now includes the linux kernel bug workaround to enable ping
 378support. The armv7 target enabled CONFIG_ARM_LPAE in the kernel to work around
 379around <a href=https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1790975>a QEMU bug</a>
 380that's gone unfixed for 4 years. Enable network support in m68k target.
 381The mcm-buildall.sh script got some minor updates, and the resulting
 382cross and native compiler binaries are now downloadable so you don't have
 383to run the build if you don't want to.</p>
 384
 385<p><u>Docs</u>:
 386"toybox --help" no longer says "see toybox --help".
 387There's an ANSI escape cheat sheet at the start of lib/tty.c.
 388Reworded some command directory READMEs, and tweaked menuconfig display.
 389Converted www/doc/mount.html and www/doc/ext2.html from text to html.
 390Freshened up design.html a little (and fixed some typos pointed out by
 391Peter Ennis).
 392Replaced the git internals video URL in roadmap.html with a different
 393performance of the same talk that hasn't been made private.
 394Added the kconfig-language.txt from Linux-2.6.12 to the kconfig/ directory.</p>
 395
 396<a name="30-11-2021" /><a href="#30-11-2021"><hr><h2><b>November 30, 2021</b></h2></a>
 397<blockquote><p>
 398Busy? We'll I've just got this bulldozer to lie in front of or otherwise it'll
 399knock my house down but otherwise no, not especially, why?</p>
 400<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
 401
 402<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.6.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.6</a>
 403(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.6>git commit</a>)
 404is out, with prebuilt <a href=downloads/binaries/0.8.6>static binaries</a> and
 405<a href=downloads/binaries/mkroot/0.8.6>mkroot images</a>
 406bootable under QEMU (using vanilla linux-5.15).</p>
 407
 408<p><u>Make root</u>: The <a href=faq.html#mkroot>system builder</a> got upgraded, with better
 409logging and layout of the output directory, plus <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/0.8.6/scripts/mkroot.sh>scripts/mkroot.sh</a>
 410should be easier to read and understand now.
 411(Also added basic support for the <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2021-August/012497.html>qualcomm hexagon</a>,
 412although it just builds a chroot filesystem, you can't boot a hexagon kernel under qemu
 413<a href=https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2021-07/msg06430.html>quite yet</a>.)</p>
 414</p>
 415
 416<p><u>New commands</u>: Rob added <b>linux32</b>.
 417Dan Brown added <b>sha256sum</b> (and the related 224/384/512 variants).
 418In pending, Elliott contributed <b>strace</b> and
 419Moritz Röhrich contributed <b>hexdump</b>.</p>
 420
 421<p><u>Features</u>:
 422Elliott added <b>date -s</b>, <b>pmap -p</b>, <b>tail -F -s</b>, <b>kill -0</b>,
 423<b>reboot/halt/poweroff -d</b>, taught <b>file</b> to
 424recognize Mach-o universal binaries, made Android's <b>log</b>
 425take input from stdin when it has no arguments, added <b>tail --bytes --lines</b>
 426(the --long synonyms for -c and -n),
 427added <b>i2cdetect -q</b>, taught <b>i2cdump</b> to write XX for
 428read failures, made <b>timeout</b> use the monotonic clock,
 429and modernized the output of <b>uptime</b>.</p>
 430
 431<p>Rob added <b>find -quit -lname -ilname</b> and <b>-d</b> as a synonym for -depth,
 432taught <b>cut -d $'\n'</b>
 433to cut by line and added posix <b>cut -nb</b> (which wraps to the start of -c
 434utf8 characters), added <b>cpio --ignore-devno --renumber-inodes</b>,
 435taught <b>cal</b> to use 3 arguments (day month year), added <b>tar --selinux</b>
 436support and a "had errors" message at the end, made <b>uname -o</b>
 437say "Toybox", and fixed the <b>grep -Fw</b> combination (used by the 64 bit
 438powerpc kernel build).</p>
 439
 440<p>Ella-0 added <b>split -n</b>. Peter Collingbourne added <b>grep -L</b>.</p>
 441
 442<p><u>Outside world</u>: The 0BSD license is <a href=https://lwn.net/Articles/868882/>now part</a> of the
 443<a href=https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/>ISO-5962</a>
 444standard. Of the currently <a href=https://github.com/search?q=license%3A0bsd&type=Repositories&ref=advsearch>38k 0BSD licensed projects on github</a> toybox
 445isn't even the most popular, it's fourth.</p>
 446
 447<p>Elliott asked that toybox's <b>cut -DF</b> feature (a cheaper
 448alternative to <b>awk '{print $3}'</b> be supported by other packages so
 449it might someday make it into posix, so Rob
 450<a href=http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2021-June/088886.html>submitted it to busybox</a>
 451where it was <a href=https://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=0068ce2fa0e3>eventually merged</a>.</p>
 452
 453<p>Added a local <a href=https://landley.net/toybox/git>git mirror</a> for
 454those reluctant to trust Microsoft Github.</p>
 455
 456<p>In the web nav bar, our <a href=https://isfreenodedeadyet.com/>freenode</a>
 457channel moved to libera.chat
 458(like <a href=https://boingboing.net/2021/05/19/freenode-irc-staff-quit-after-new-owner-seizes-control.html>everyone else's</a>;
 459<a href=https://lwn.net/Articles/856543/>there</a>
 460<a href=https://hackaday.com/2021/05/20/freenode-debacle-prompts-staff-exodus-new-network/>was</a>
 461<a href=https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1396280769778098185>a</a>
 462<a href=https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1396237336988446722>certain</a>
 463<a href=https://www.devever.net/~hl/freenode_abuse>amount</a>
 464<a href=https://twitter.com/TwitchiH/status/1395756163527028739>of</a>
 465<a href=https://twitter.com/joepie91/status/1395364883303182339>drama</a>
 466<a href=https://twitter.com/RichFelker/status/1404816846734385164>involved</a>).</p>
 467
 468<p><u>Pending</u>: lots more work on <b>toysh</b>: it has basic $((math)) support
 469now, += assignment, the "declare" command and corresponding variable
 470types (declare -i, declare -u, etc), several bugfixes, greatly
 471improved support for background processes on NOMMU systems, and a bunch
 472more sh.test entries.</p>
 473
 474<p>Elliott fixed <b>modprobe</b>'s parsing of short lines. Rob fixed a
 475division by zero error when <b>vi</b> tries to edit a zero length file.
 476Anqi Dong made sure that syslogd messages sent to sockets end with a
 477newline. Eric Molitor significantly upgrade <b>wget</b> with http 1.1,
 478chunked encoding, and (external library) https (TLS 1.2) support,
 479plus several bugfixes. Michael Hope fixed <b>tftpd</b>'s option parsing.</p>
 480
 481<p><u>Documentation</u>: The roadmap.html and status.html pages
 482got noticeable updates. (status.html is now directly generated by
 483scripts/mkstatus.py, the old status.html wrapper that server-side-included
 484status.gen has been removed).
 485The <a href=design.html>design</a>
 486page provides better links to the LP64 documentation, and the
 487<a href=code.html>code</a> page explains a corner case where the filename
 488and first command name expect to match (and how to work around it if they don't).
 489Some website files weren't in the repository: two jpegs linked from html
 490files, and the www/.htaccess file that triggers the server side includes
 491in the navigation menu is now checked in. Johannes Schmitz fixed a
 492typo in about.html.</p>
 493
 494<p>The <b>shred</b> usage line now includes all options.
 495The <b>logwrapper</b> command now warns when it isn't built standalone.
 496The <b>help</b> command no longer shows a header line about toybox unless
 497it's called with no arguments. (It still shows it for command --help.)
 498The --help option no longer needs to be the first option, and is
 499checked before the "Not root" error message for restricted commands.</p>
 500
 501<p><u>Bugfixes</u>:
 502Elliott made <b>ps</b> exit with status 1 if no processes were shown (for LTP),
 503fixed an off-by-one in <b>dmesg</b> and a bounds check in <b>netstat</b>,
 504fixed <b>pidof -s</b>, and taught <b>rmmod</b> to handle multiple arguments.
 505Denys Vlasenko pointed out that <b>free -t</b> is "total" not "terabytes".
 506Samanta Navarro pointed out a leftover 32 bit limitation in argument groups.
 507Mikhail Kashkarov fixed mkdir's error handling for existing directories
 508without -p.
 509Rob fixed the 32 bit <b>readelf</b> build on Android, fixed a race condition
 510in <b>tar</b> leading
 511to the occasional spurious archiver warning,
 512<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/127cff38809e>changed cp</a>
 513to work around a posix violation in the kernel, made xparsedate() handle more
 514whitespace and ignore trailing + or - (a NOP timezone), made <b>su</b> log the
 515right username, switched getuid() checks to geteuid() in <b>df</b> and <b>ping</b>,
 516fixed a place in the test suite where do_test()
 517could get confused by symlinks in the $PATH (calling realpath too early
 518and losing the name of the command being run),
 519made <b>env -i</b> use the old $PATH to run its command,
 520and made <b>grep --color</b> highlight all matches.</p>
 521
 522<p>Worked around a bug in glibc+gcc 9.3 where linking against librt.a
 523(for things like timer_create()) pulls in libgcc_eh.a which uses
 524threads, meaning you can't statically link against librt.a from
 525a non-threaded app. (I hadn't noticed because it works fine with the musl
 526and llvm/bionic toolchains, only fails statically linking on e.g. debian.)
 527The <a href=https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d18760560593>kernel fix</a> for the cpio encrypted filesystem issue worked around in 0.8.5 made
 528it in. Similarly, the
 529FS_IOC_{GET,SET}{VERSION,FLAGS} ioctl family are <a href=https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-api/msg49101.html>historically broken</a>
 530(taking an unsigned int argument while advertising signed long),
 531which <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/dcfac5c983ad>we fixed</a> and reported upstream to a long
 532round of bikeshedding (sadly
 533the result seems to have been the man page maintainer
 534<a href=https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/man2?id=3de87d46840d>giving up</a>
 535on documenting ioctls at all.</p>
 536
 537<p><u>Cleanups</u>:
 538<b>cut</b> switched to FLAG() macros and no longer allows -f with -F,
 539<b>eject</b> uses FLAG() macros and the linux/eject.h header,
 540prettycool@protonmail added tabs to <b>time</b>'s output, and Rob removed
 541the floating point dependency from time. Minor cleanups
 542to lsattr, lspci, nsenter, xxd, file, insmod, modprobe, arp, bootchartd, pmap,
 543comm, lsof, blkid, crond, init, userdel, makedevs, and scripts/make.sh.
 544The "int fd = fd;"
 545initialization hack to shut up gcc's "may be used uninitalized, but isn't" false
 546positive warning has been replaced by a QUIET macro that resolves
 547to nothing on llvm (which doesn't have the gcc bug).
 548Ryan Pritchard reported a bug where <b>alias ls="ls --color"</b> would prevent
 549--help or --version from being the first argument to the command, which was
 550a pain to fix without breaking things like <b>echo -- --version</b> and
 551<b>basename -s --help file--help</b>.
 552(Both toy_singleinit() in main.c _and_ get_optflags() in lib/args.c now
 553check for those.)</p>
 554
 555<p><u>Infrastructure</u>:
 556xabspath() now has a more granular (flag based) control interface.</p>
 557
 558<p><b>scripts/make.sh</b> now uses wait -n (available since bash 4.3 in February 2014)
 559to keep the processors busier during a parallel build.
 560Tests are now running in a subshell, which means functions and local
 561variables defined in one don't pollute others during "make tests".
 562
 563<p>Guo Chuang reported that lsattr won't build on an 8 year old version of
 564<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/pull/292#issuecomment-899895909>centos</a>,
 565which is still supported for 2 more years because Red Hat can
 566be paid to have a 10 year support horizon, longer than toybox's 7. Rob
 567fixed it (and merged a similarly ancient compilation failure fix when
 568building pending/ip.c against a 3.10 kernel),
 569but the <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2021-August/012537.html>philosophal argument</a>
 570remains <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2021-September/012603.html>unresolved</a>.</p>
 571
 572<p>Standalone builds can now override the .config file location with
 573KCONFIG_CONFIG same as the multiplexer build. scripts/single.sh can
 574now cope with a missing .config file (it uses the defconfig values
 575for the CONFIG_TOYBOX_* global symbols).
 576"make install_airlock" no longer needs host versions of sha256sum and sha512sum.</p>
 577
 578<p>In the test suite, <b>VERBOSE=spam</b> now shows expands successful tests
 579like it would for errors.</p>
 580
 581<p><b>scripts/record-commands</b> got updated and logwrapper got renamed <b>logpath</b>.</p>
 582
 583<a name="19-05-2021" /><a href="#19-05-2021"><hr><h2><b>May 19, 2021</b></h2></a>
 584<blockquote><p>It was of course a descendant of these eccentric poets
 585who invented the spurious tales of impending doom which enabled the people of
 586Golgafrincham to rid themselves of the useless third of their population.
 587The other two-thirds stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich and happy lives
 588until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from
 589a dirty telephone.</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
 590
 591<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.5.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.5</a>
 592(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.5>git commit</a>)
 593is out, with prebuilt <a href=downloads/binaries/0.8.5>static binaries</a> and
 594<a href=downloads/binaries/mkroot/0.8.5>mkroot images</a>
 595bootable under QEMU (using vanilla linux-5.12, except that s390 needed another
 596<a href=http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2105.2/02904.html>perl
 597removal patch</a>).</p>
 598
 599<p>This development cycle had thirty commits to sh.c fixing bugs and adding
 600features to <b>toysh</b>. Shell functions and local variables are now implemented,
 601along with the "set" builtin and trace support, and job control is
 602about halfway in. The shell as a whole is <a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule>maybe 80% done</a>, but still
 603has some obvious gaps like $((math)) and interactive command line
 604history/editing, plus a bunch of testing.</p>
 605
 606<p><u>New commands</u>:
 607Moritz Röhrich added <b>pwgen</b> and <b>base32</b>, and
 608Elliott Hughes added <b>unicode</b>. The
 609<b>readelf</b> command got promoted out of pending, and
 610<b>sha3sum</b> is now switched on in defconfig.</p>
 611
 612<p>Michael Christensen added <b>chsh</b> to pending, which hasn't been promoted
 613yet because it's part of a group of commands (useradd, userdel, groupadd,
 614groupdel) that should all be promoted together at some point
 615(and depend on lib/passwd.c, which could use some more work).</p>
 616
 617<p><u>Upgrades</u>:
 618<b>cpio</b> now supports extracting multiple concatenated archives.
 619<b>file</b> now recognizes android's new XML binary format.
 620<b>devmem</b> now works on nommu, can handle 0x prefxes on the address,
 621and prints
 622hex or decimal output to match the address type.
 623<b>df</b> -a now shows overmounted filesystems.
 624<b>test</b> -k checks the sticky bit.
 625Added -t to <b>install</b>, <b>cp</b>, and <b>mv</b>, and -u to <b>cp</b>
 626and <b>cpio</b>.
 627<b>find</b> -executable checks that _we_ can execute them (u+x could be owned
 628by a different user or have selinux weirdness).</p>
 629
 630<p>Elliott added several features to <b>date</b> (--iso, %:z output format, and
 631--utc as a synonym for -u), added a <b>sed</b> s///x option,
 632added units to <b>ulimit</b> output, and
 633made several UI changes to <b>hexedit</b> including a color
 634mode (which is now the default, press x to toggle between old and new
 635display), masked out the file type in <b>chmod</b> error messages and
 636taught it to handle complex modes (like u+s+s), 
 637hardened <b>file</b> and <b>readelf</b> against invalid input,
 638added a portability.h workaround for macos statvfs for <b>df</b>,
 639enabled line buffering in <b>echo</b> and <b>yes</b>,
 640and significatly sped up <b>tr</b>. Rob similarly optimized <b>seq</b>
 641and <b>count</b>.</p>
 642
 643<p><b>make tests</b> now defaults to VERBOSE=fail (and now has VERBOSE=all to
 644continue after failure, and VERBOSE=quiet to show FAIL: lines without
 645diff -u output).
 646Cleanups to tee, netstat, file, and df. Added "static" annotations in a
 647lot of commands, made more things use FLAG() macros. Ethan Sommer pointed out
 648an unnecessary wrapper function in chgrp.
 649In pending, Elliott did some cleanups and bugfixes to gettty, telnet, telnetd,
 650tftpd, init, modprobe, and dd, and added more features to vi.
 651Rob did some cleanup on modprobe.</p>
 652
 653<p><u>Bugfixes</u>:
 654Yi-Yo Chiang fixed a <b>rm</b> bug where -f could get confused by read
 655only filesystems and produce an error trying to unlink a nonexistent
 656file, pointed out <b>install</b> -D was broken when the target file
 657already exists, pointed out a <b>cpio</b> interaction with certain encrypted
 658filesystems where readlink() wouldn't write as much payload as the header
 659promised (corrupting the archive) and fixed another cpio bug where -t test
 660mode would chown() files, and fixed quoting in mount.test.
 661Elliott fixed a sequencing issue in <b>setsid</b>'s system calls,
 662fixed some <b>sed</b> tests (sed's lie-to-autoconf --version
 663output was preventing toyonly tests from triggering) and
 664fixed <b>tar</b>'s base 256 output for very large files.
 665Nir Lichtman pointed out that <b>rm</b> -p shouldn't try to rmdir / at the end,
 666Luke Frankart pointed out a typo that broke <b>test</b> checking file modes,
 667Firas Khalil Khana fixed a duplicate entry in the roadmap,
 668Ethan Sommer fixed <b>install</b> -Dt,
 669Andy Hu requested that <b>mount</b> handle mixed options like
 670-tnomsdos,smbfs.
 671Denys Nykula reported a <b>chmod</b> regression,
 672asm89 pointed out a <b>netcat</b> bug writing transactions larger than
 6734k,
 674Daniel Santana fixed <b>df</b> combining -P and -k,
 675Robin Hsu fixed <b>grep</b> getting confused by libc setting errno when
 676a library function call succeeded.
 677Puck Meerburg taught the <b>gunzip</b> code not to be confused by FEXTRA entries
 678(as described in RFC 1952) and added a test suite entry for that.</p>
 679
 680<p><b>find</b> handles empty arguments properly now (with test), <b>date</b>
 681-I with no arguments no longer segfaults, <b>grep</b> -f /dev/null no
 682longer adds a "" regex matching everything, -z no longer splits patterns
 683on \n, and -o can print zero length matches,
 684<b>cp</b> -t works with one argument and with --parents.
 685<b>readelf</b> displays properly in 80 columns and doesn't reject .bss
 686off end of file, and <b>sed</b> s///2 now works when there isn't more than one
 687match.
 688<b>tar</b> now removes empty directories where it wants to put a non-directory.
 689<b>microcom</b> sets serial device terminal attributes correctly.</p>
 690
 691<p>The prebuilt x86-64 binaries shouldn't segfault on older x86-64 processors
 692anymore (workaround for gcc bug).
 693Cross compiling was sometimes confusing install.sh because it created
 694a hyphenated "toybox-$TARGET" and then tried to make symlinks to just "toybox".</p>
 695
 696<p><u>Build</u>:
 697CONFIG_TOYBOX_I18N went away: toybox builds always support utf8 now.
 698Ella-0 added OpenBSD support (but not a separate defconfig, try
 699"make freebsd_defconfig").</p>
 700
 701<p><u>Library</u>:
 702utf8towc() is now unsigned instead of wchar_t, matching wctoutf8().
 703xclose() tests if fd is -1 so the caller doesn't have to.
 704txpect (the test suite's built-in "expect", implemented in shell) can
 705now do regex matches, and sh.test uses this.</p>
 706
 707<p>Elliott added the failing regex to the xregcomp() error message, and
 708made multiple portability tweaks (header tweaks to build in more
 709environments, running tests on Raspberry Pi OS and under mksh,
 710fix utf8 locale selection on macos).</p>
 711
 712<p><u>Docs</u>:
 713<b>chmod</b>'s help text explains why o+s doesn't set +t (and has a
 714test for it). The <b>echo</b> help text is more compact.
 715Checked in a better conversion of <a href=https://landley.net/toybox/toycans.png>toycans.png</a>.</p>
 716
 717<a name="24-10-2020" /><a href="#24-10-2020"><hr><h2><b>October 24, 2020</b></h2></a>
 718<blockquote><p>
 719"We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-five thousand to
 720one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we
 721are sure what is normal anyway."</p>
 722<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
 723</blockquote>
 724
 725<p>After a longer and slightly more
 726<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/07a896862ddf>turbulent</a>
 727development cycle than some,
 728<a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.4.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.4</a>
 729(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.4>git commit</a>)
 730is out with new commands <b>sha3sum</b> and <b><a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/6b4c32ae3986>watchdog</a></b>.</p>
 731
 732<p>There are <a href=downloads/binaries/mkroot/0.8.4>prebuilt mkroot binaries</a>
 733now, tiny toybox linux systems for a dozen architectures, all bootable under
 734qemu. (The vmlinux in each tarball is a vanilla linux-5.9 kernel built
 735from the included config file.)</p>
 736
 737<p>The FAQ got <a href=faq.html>noticeably larger</a>, and the README has
 738more links. New command features include the <b>sed -s</b> flag,
 739<b>cpio --no-preserve-owner</b> now affects archive creation,
 740Elliott added <b>tar -I</b> and multi-type
 741<b>find -type a,b,c</b> support, Mark Salyzyn added <b>xargs -P</b> to
 742run parallel jobs, the <b>ps</b> and <b>top</b> commands
 743now autodetect pid length, and <b>top</b> adjusts units for memory display based on
 744system size.</p>
 745
 746<p><u>Toysh and toyroot</u>:
 747lots of new work on <b>toysh</b>: 29 commits to sh.c since last release, adding 1500
 748lines and deleting 700, plus a bunch of sh.tests entries). Since last release
 749we implemented wildcards, case/esac and select, brace expansion sequences
 750(ala {1..10..2} and {a..z}),
 751the remaining variable slice types ${a#y} ${a%y} ${a^y} ${a,y}
 752${a/search/replace}, the "<b>source</b>" shell builtin,
 753the start of job control, and several bugfixes.
 754Plus the standalone "<b>make sh</b>" build understands MAYFORK now. It's
 755still missing features like functions() and $((math)) but it's getting
 756close to usable now.</p>
 757
 758<p><u>Documentation</u>:
 759Some of the README contents moved to the FAQ, and the README's "presentations"
 760section got some new links. Several new <a href=faq.html>FAQ</a> entries explaining things like
 761mkroot ("how do I build a working Linux system
 762with toybox"), cross compiling (how to get/setup the 2 compilers and
 7633 libc we regression test against), and "where does toybox fit into the
 764linux/android ecosystem".
 765The "toybox --help" output now lists the project's web page (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/issues/50>by request</a>).
 766Elliott removed
 767getevent (an android board bringup/hardware debugging tool built by running
 768a python script against kernel headers, not really in scope for toybox),
 769fixed xargs help formatting, and taught the toybox multiplexer's
 770command list output (and "kill -l") to measure the current the terminal width
 771when wordwrapping (previously hardwired to 80 columns).
 772If you're curious, I checked in my <a href=www/release.txt>release procedure
 773checklist</a>, and
 774fixed a stale link in the nav bar on the left ("statistics" changed domains).
 775Firas Khalil Khana fixed some issues in the roadmap, and Rob
 776tweaked the roadmap so status.html is slightly more current.</p>
 777
 778<p><u>Tests</u>:
 779The "make tests" target now fails if any of the tests it ran failed.
 780Lots of TEST_HOST tests got fixed (checking for specific error messages exposes
 781TEST_HOST to version skew, and scripts/test.sh will now skip TEST_HOST
 782commands that aren't installed) and added toyonly annotations as necessary
 783(replacing most uses of SKIP_HOST).
 784Eric Molitor added automated github tests on MacOS and Ubuntu using their
 785"workflows" thing.
 786The clang asan plumbing slows some code down more than 10 times, so some testing timeouts were expanded.
 787
 788<p><u>Pending</u>:
 789Eric Molitor did a bunch of work on route: moved it to sbin, added xsend and
 790xrecv, taught display_routes() and setroute to use the rtnetlink API and
 791do hostname lookups, added support for mss, win, and irtt, merged ipv6 and ipv4
 792codepaths with autodetection of address type, implemented RTA_CACHEINFO
 793support, switched exit paths to perror_exit(), and removed unused code.
 794Ethan Sommer fixed warnings in dhcpd, removed a bunch of unnecessary
 795; after GLOBALS() blocks and an unnecessary return in df.
 796Erik Moqvist fixed dns setting in the dhcp client.
 797Rob did some cleanup on bootchartd, traceroute, getty...
 798Elliott fixed getty to reliably update utmp.
 799Chris Sarra added ipv6 support to wget.
 800Ariadne Conill submitted several small fixes from testing Alpine Linux with
 801toybox, and Antoni Villalonga i Noceras fixed typos in error messages.</p>
 802
 803<p><u>Bugfixes</u>:
 804Elliott avoided sign extension in devmem, and Ethan Sommer switched it from
 805getpagesize() to posix sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE).
 806Elliott fixed chmod -R
 807ignoring dangling symlinks, fixed stty <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/issues/251>misparsing c_iflags</a>, fixed the chattr f2fs test with
 808compression enabled, taught blkid not to show empty tags, taught xparsedate()
 809to read date's default output format, fixed a recent echo -e \0 regression,
 810changed cpio -p parsing to match a <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-August/011955.html>bug</a> in the gnu version
 811which an existing script <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/fa1af3b085cc>depended on</a>,
 812and switched hwclock back to looking
 813only at /dev/rtc0 for <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/70e2232ce61c>reasons</a> involving kernel version skew and vendor bug reports.</p>
 814
 815<p>David Legault pointed out that unescape2() (and thus echo -e) wasn't handling
 816\0 right.
 817Khem Raj reported that mips glibc doesn't have SIGSTKFLT, leading to
 818a build break if we assume glibc behaves consistently, which led to a bunch of
 819macos signal portability cleanups from Elliott.
 820William Djupström fixed tar extracting long file paths, adding hardlinks
 821to an archive, and reported that --exclude wasn't working.
 822Peter McConalogue pointed out that cp/mv -i prompt should
 823default N, and mv should only prompt when stdin is a tty.
 824Patrick Oppenlander made rtcwake and hwclock default to UTC if /dev/adjtime
 825isn't available, suggested watchdog catch SIGINT, and caught an
 826uninitialized offset in blkdiscard which gcc apparently didn't.
 827Ryan Pritchard reported that <b>file</b> wasn't getting gif heights right,
 828and Elliott added gif version output so TEST_HOST provided similar output.
 829Martin Stjernholm fixed <b>cp -P</b> to not follow symlinks and updated
 830the help text to say it's not the default.
 831Antoni Villalonga added more --long asiases to <b>chgrp/chown/rmdir</b>.
 832
 833<p>The symlink indirection code subtly broke xexec() so it would still try to call
 834a builtin when given a path to a command (fixed now).
 835The code to trip \n off xgetline() was using the length of the allocation
 836instead of the length of the read.
 837Netcat no longer leaks sockfd into child processes.
 838Patch "fuzz" support was outputting context lines from the hunk, not the
 839file. Chrisrfq fixed i2cdetect parameter reading.
 840Chris Sarra taught dd not to throw an error trying to truncate device files,
 841added a misshing fflush() to lib/password.c, fixed a parse error in logger
 842preventing local facility logging from working right, taught init
 843to reload inittab when it receives SIGHUP, and fixed a memory leak in tar.</p>
 844
 845<p><u>Library</u>:
 846New xvdaemon() function daemonizing on nommu systems, to wean commands
 847off daemon() which requires TOYBOX_FORK.
 848Teach sendfile_len() to use copy_file_range() when available, with compile
 849time probe. Fix xsignal_all_killers() to install the correct handler.
 850Rob switched dirtree_path() to a non-recursive implementation, and
 851taught dirtree that a top level entry named "" is equivalent to
 852"." but should not show up in dirtree_path(),
 853read_password() now reads from tty device rather than stdin, and handles ctrl-c and ctrl-d, and
 854human_readable() now has HR_NODOT so it can print single digit numbers without going "0.0".
 855Petri Gynther increased the vmstat column sizes so it didn't fit
 856in 80 columns anymore.
 857Elliott added UTC offset support to xparsedate().</p>
 858
 859<p><u>Infrastructure</u>:
 860mkroot now only passes --no-preserve-owner to cpio (so initramfs files
 861belong to root rather than whichever user ran the build) when using toybox's
 862version, because the other one is brain-damaged and errors out not
 863understanding it. (It understands it for extract, but not create. Yes really.)
 864New PENDING variable you can set to enable more than just sh and route out
 865of pending.
 866The "make distclean" no longer deletes root_download (where mkroot's "extra plumbing"
 867file saves source code downloads it tarballs, such as dropbear).</p>
 868
 869<p><u>Cleanup</u>:
 870Cleanup openvt (35 lines added, 78 lines removed)
 871Cleanup blkdiscard so lib/args.c parses the -o and -l numbers, which means
 87232 bit systems are limited to 2 gigabyte sizes which is a TODO item systemwide.
 873oneit now uses flag macros and mentions -rn in the help. demo-utf8towc
 874now has main.c call setlocale for it.
 875Some cleanup on stty.</p>
 876
 877<a name="11-05-2020" /><a href="#11-05-2020"><hr><h2><b>May 11, 2020</b></h2></a>
 878<blockquote>
 879<p>Ford: Ah. A
 880<a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSsR419HBpQ>towel</a>.
 881Keep this and guard it with your life.</p>
 882<p>Arthur: Huh?</p>
 883<p>Ford: Listen, it's a tough universe. There's all sorts of people and things
 884trying to do you, kill you, rip you off, everything. If you're going to
 885survive out there, you've really got to know where your
 886<a href=towel.jpg>towel</a> is.</p>
 887<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
 888</blockquote>
 889
 890<p>Despite everything <a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.3.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.3</a>
 891(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.3>git commit</a>)
 892is finally out, with new commands <b>rtcwake</b> from Elliott Hughes and
 893<b>blkdiscard</b> from Patrick Oppenlander.
 894The big news is "<b>make root</b>" now boots to a shell prompt,
 895with toysh making it all the way through toyroot's init script.
 896(Some people were looking forward to <b>patch --fuzz</b> support too.)</p>
 897
 898<p><u>Toyroot</u>: <b>make root</b> now does what it says on the tin, it
 899builds a bootable toybox-based Linux system using two source
 900packages (toybox and linux). The trivial version is "make root && sudo chroot
 901root/host/fs /init". Here's
 902a <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-April/011667.html>post with instructions</a> if you want to know how to build the
 903cross compilers for testing the various architectures. The self-contained
 904<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/0.8.3/scripts/mkroot.sh>script
 905that builds a simple bootable Linux system</a> is 250 lines long, and
 906should be easy to read if you want to know how it works.</p>
 907
 908<p>It also has basic module support, meaning arguments that aren't X=Y variable
 909assignments are the names of scripts to run to build more
 910packages at the end of the build. I checked in an <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/scripts/root/dropbear>example package</a>,
 911and there's generic "download and extract source tarballs"
 912<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/scripts/root/plumbing>plumbing</a> available to such modules.
 913(The Makefile doesn't know how to pass module names through to the script,
 914so instead of "make root" you have to
 915call the script directly, ala "scripts/mkroot.sh CROSS=sh4 LINUX=~/linux dropbear".)</p>
 916
 917<p>The resulting root filesystem now uses /root as the home
 918dir for UID 0, and creates /dev/fd and /dev/shm in devtmpfs. The build works
 919around a kernel
 920build bug where "make distclean" doesn't work in a "cp -sfR" symlink
 921directory. (The bug meant if you pointed LINUX= at unclean source, it was
 922unhappy, so now it distcleans the source directory before copying it. This
 923modifies said source directory, which is not ideal, but as usual the kernel guys
 924<a href=http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2002.2/00083.html>ignored
 925the bug report</a>, so a workaround was required.)
 926The CROSS=all build announces each target in the title bar, puts
 927its logs into root/log, and has better trap handling to stop with one
 928ctrl-c.
 929Since last release it uses a more concise config format for the various kernel
 930arch targets (which shrank the script by about 50%), and merged
 931the old (now removed) scripts/cross.sh into the main script so
 932"make CROSS=armv7l LINUX=~/linux" is
 933literally just a call to "scripts/mkroot.sh CROSS=armv7l LINUX=~/linux" now.</p>
 934
 935<p>As for <b>scripts/mcm-buildall.sh</b> building cross compilers,
 936of COURSE gcc 8.3 requires a different configuration to build the same
 937toolchain as previous versions, it's gcc. It now builds a proper
 938nommu libc for sh2eb without a broken fork() call in it that can never
 939be used but prevents compile-time probes from detecting nommu,
 940and checks that the cross compiler completed before trying to build
 941the native compiler.</p>
 942
 943<p>This was all tested with a recent
 944<a href=https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make/commit/5086175f2902>version</a>
 945of musl-cross-make with the top level Makefile
 946edited to use BINUTILS_VER = 2.32 because the newer one
 947<a href=https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-sh/msg56844.html>breaks the kernel
 948build</a>
 949and LINUX_VER = 4.19.90 because the default musl-cross-make config uses an
 950out-of-tree headers package for some reason (those who forget history are
 951<a href=https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/4/28/194>doomed to repeat it</a>) which
 952breaks m68k and s390x. I won't post binaries of the resulting toolchains
 953because they're GPLv3, but <a href=https://musl.cc/>Thalheim might</a>.
 954(I've also <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-May/011673.html>test built</a>
 955with the Android NDK, but bionic's startup code currently segfaults before
 956calling main() if it can't open /dev/null, and the kernel guys
 957<a href=https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/9/13/651>ignored my patches</a> to
 958make CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT work in initramfs.)</p>
 959
 960<p>At the moment toyroot cheats and uses two commands out of pending: toysh
 961is about 80% of the way to being useful but still missing some
 962obvious features like function support, job and terminal control, command
 963history, $((math)), wildcard expansion... plus a lot of bash features like array
 964variables, so it isn't out of pending yet. And route needs to be redone to use the
 965netlink interface that can handle multiple routing tables. For the moment
 966scripts/mkroot.sh adds both of them to defconfig if you haven't already
 967got a .config when you run it. (If you build and can't boot, your .config
 968probably hasn't got CONFIG_SH switched on. Fix it in menuconfig, or
 969rm .config and try gain.)</p>
 970
 971<p><u>New toybox features</u>:
 972Elliott taught <b>patch</b> to understand [FILE [PATCH]] arguments, made
 973<b>cal</b> highlight the current day, added -T to <b>cp</b>/<b>mv</b>,
 974did a lot of work on <b>lsattr</b>/<b>chattr</b> (including adding -p
 975and "chattr ="), added tar --absolute-names, taught <b>id</b> to
 976support numeric lookup and handle unknown groups, made -G show all
 977groups, and removed context= from -Z.
 978Rob added <b>patch -F</b> (fuzz factor) support and <b>help -u</b> (usage only),
 979taught <b>echo -e</b> about bash extensions like \uXXXX unicode escapes,
 980<b>netcat -L</b> no longer automatically includes stderr (new -E
 981option does that),
 982<b>setsid</b> now uses -c (like the man page says) instead of -t, and added
 983-w (wait) and -d (detach from tty). 
 984Andrew Ilijic added <b>ls -w</b>, removed trailing whitespace on output,
 985and added tests for -C and -x.</p>
 986
 987<p><u>Library</u>:
 988another fix to 32 bit option parsing of long long optflag values,
 989remove getdirname() and just use the libc function (which modifies
 990its argument, but we don't have to free a malloc),
 991dlist_terminate() can now be called repeatedly on the same list,
 992new relative_path() function finds path from one directory to another,
 993and readfd() works like readfile() but on an already open fd.
 994Use MPATH macros in mkpathat(). Elliott added macOS versions of
 995dev_minor()/dev_major()/makedev() to portability.c,
 996implemented posix_fallocate() for macOS, removed a
 997leftover uClibc workaround in fallocate that was breaking macOS,
 998and moved the table of ELF architectures from file to lib/lib.c (so
 999readelf can share).
1000Park Ju Hyung pointed out the fast path of fdlength() was commented out,
1001and we switched it to the 64 bit API while we were there (and then Elliott
1002added macOS support).
1003Joeky taught file to recognize 7z archives.</p>
1004
1005<p><u>Pending</u>:
1006The shell got a bunch of work: standalone "make sh" now includes the
1007multiplexer for builtin commands like "exit" and "cd". Added MAYFORK annotation
1008for commands that exist in the $PATH but can also be run within the shell
1009process (and sometimes have different behavior within the shell):
1010currently applied to help, echo, false, kill, printf, pwd, test, time, and
1011true.</p>
1012
1013<p>Elliott added new commands <b>getopt</b> and <b>readelf</b>.
1014Jarno Mäkipää taught wget how to follow http 301 and 302 redirects,
1015and did lots of work on vi. (Elliott also did work on vi.)
1016Gavin Howard fixed a comparison bug in bc.
1017Ethan Sommer fixed numerous small issues (including several build
1018warnings and FLAG() macro conversions).</p>
1019
1020<p><u>Bugfixes</u>:
1021<b>tar</b> extract now deletes files and symlinks where it's making a directory,
1022<b>find -L -type -l</b> now finds dangling symlinks, extra #ifdefs in
1023portability.h prevent old gcc versions from barfing on __has_include(),
1024xgetline() now returns NULL at EOF, tee with no arguments was
1025writing to stdout twice, setsid works on nommu (I.E. vfork) now,
1026<b>netcat -L</b> no longer accumulates zombie processes,
1027<b>sntp</b> now uses adjtimex instead of adjtime (to build on bionic).
1028xcreate_stdio() was checking WARN_ONLY in the wrong field (and tar was
1029passing it in the wrong field, so it worked there).
1030Several people wrestled with the <b>xargs</b> "argument too long" problem.
1031Alessio Balsini fixed memory leaks in loopback_setup() and "wayling"
1032added a missing continue to losetup.
1033Elliott fixed xargs -E, various things in modinfo,
1034added an error check to gzip when using zlib (which copies non-gzip data to
1035the output verbatim for some reason),
1036found an case where dirtree could use
1037uninitialized data and silenced "Invalid argument" warnings (triggered by
1038Android's selinux policies making stat() and readlink() fail),
1039fixed locale support in macOS (both in iconv
1040and in main.c), taught stat to show filesystem time on macOS,
1041fixed a 32 bit truncation in sntp, fixed a memory access one byte outside
1042of its array in patch.c, removed the cpio --trailer option,
1043and widened the pid display fields in ps to
10446 digits. Rich Felker fixed find.c assuming
1045time_t is a long (y2038 issue on 32 bit).
1046Greg Kaiser fixed a thinko in get_block_device_size().
1047Jarno Mäkipää fixed utf8 support in cut -C, and cp --parents.
1048David Legault complained that dir/.* tells rm to delete dir/.. and we'd do it.
1049JakeSFR pointed out a bug in file's identification of broken symlinks.
1050William Haddon fixed cp to treat a directory with a trailing slash
1051teh same as one without.
1052Denys Nykula fixed rm -i not to prompt for an empty "" argument.
1053SebiderSushi reported that chmod g+s wasn't working.
1054The linux kernel doesn't let an O_PATH fd work with fgetxattr(), so
1055Elliott switched <b>ls</b> to use the path-based functions now (which is racy,
1056it means you can stat() one inode and get the xattrs for a different one,
1057but nobody in kernel land seems to use xattrs much so they're not fully
1058supported by the API, and who's crazy enough to use xattrs for security
1059anyway). Derick Pallas pointed out an xclearenv() bug.
1060Atatsulo (or possibly luolongjuna) did a lot of work on the <b>ping</b>
1061command: pointed out min/range/max were out of order,
1062that we shouldn't print a summary unless we received at least one
1063reply packet, and implemented ttl support.</p>
1064
1065<p><u>Build plumbing</u>:
1066The "make root CROSS=all" build announces each target in the title bar, puts
1067its logs into root/log, and has better trap handling to stop with one
1068ctrl-c.</p>
1069
1070<p>Fixed scripts/single.sh to work when PREFIX has no trailing slash,
1071make silentoldconfig no longer feeds "y" to kconfig (which puts menus in a
1072loop) and instead just feeds in newlines to accept whatever the default is.
1073The non-git version number I keep forgetting to update each release moved
1074from main.c to toys.h.
1075Fixed a couple different errors in mkflags.c (one of which caused ls --color
1076to set all the other flags).</p>
1077
1078<p>Elliott added more macos support and tests, and added
1079fallocate, cp, mktemp, and mv to the macOS defconfig.</p>
1080
1081<p><u>Cleanup</u>:
1082Rob did some cleanup on xargs, ls, md5sum, and sort, tidied up main.c a bit,
1083made cp, base64, dmesg, and free use FLAG macros,
1084and switched fallocate to new style global names.
1085Elliott Hughes switched rfkill from the old byte at a time get_line()
1086to libc getline(), made du use FLAG() macros, and mad chattr use
1087standard toybox argument parsing for -v and -p.
1088Several commands (help, cp) had sub-options removed from menuconfig.
1089Merged realpath into readlink.c, and use xabspath() instead of libc realpath().</p>
1090
1091<p><u>Documentation</u>:
1092New roadmap section about <a href=roadmap.html#packages>other packages</a>
1093that toybox can (eventually) replace.</p>
1094
1095<p>Update roadmap to note that posix-2008 moved to a different URL (content
1096at the old URL undergoes random changes), and link to the IETF RFCs.
1097design.html explains more of the history of environment sizes on links
1098and has a #bits anchor tag.</p>
1099
1100<p>Update the <a href=design.html#bits>LP64 section</a> of design.html to
1101fish the documents out of archive.org now that unix.org is gone,
1102and show the actual size table locally.</p>
1103
1104<p>Elliott improved the help of <b>date</b> and <b>chattr</b>, and
1105made the usage: lines in the posix directory more consistent.</p>
1106
1107<p>Shrank the sed help from 150 lines to 90-ish.</p>
1108
1109<p><u>Tests</u>:
1110New "txpect" performs interactive tests, running through a sequence of
1111writes to a command's stdin and reads from stdout and stderr, when failing it
1112reports the first non-matching step. (This for example lets sh.test check
1113the shell line continuation logic prompts with $PS1 and $PS2 appropriately
1114with various unfinished input lines, and that "echo hello; if" doesn't
1115output hello before prompting for the next line of input.) Added
1116VERBOSE=xpect to print out each read and write successfully performed by txpect.</p>
1117
1118<p>runtest.sh only creates an "input" file when the input argument isn't empty,
1119EVAL doesn't supply -- (you have to provide your own if you want that).</p>
1120
1121<p>Rob added basic <b>stat</b>, <b>patch</b>, and <b>tee</b> tests.
1122Jarno added a bunch of <b>vi</b> tests.
1123Elliott fixed tests for <b>ifconfig</b>, <b>lsattr</b>, <b>chattr</b>,
1124and <b>date</b>, added tests for find, id, xargs, and made
1125the id, iconv, env, file, printf and cat tests work on macOS (and skipped
1126the du tests there). Rob cleaned up chmod tests.</p>
1127
1128<p><u>Sheer pedantry</u>:
1129true and false now have usage: lines (which you have to "help false" to see
1130because they (intentionally!) don't support --help.
1131Renamed get_chunk()/dump_chunk() to read_chunk()/write_chunk() in tail.c
1132Elliott fixed some typos.</p>
1133
1134<a name="18-10-2019" /><a href="#18-10-2019"><hr><h2><b>October 18, 2019</b></h2></a>
1135<blockquote>
1136<p>"In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real
1137men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri
1138were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri."
1139</p> <p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
1140</blockquote>
1141
1142<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.2</a>
1143(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.2>git commit</a>)
1144is finally out (only two months late).</p>
1145
1146<p>The new commands this time are minor variants of existing ones
1147(<b>dnsdomainname</b> is hostname -d, <b>arch</b> is uname -m), but about
11481/3 of toysh got implemented in pending, <a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> got merged as a "make root" target (see Build),
1149and Android's <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2019-August/010845.html>hermetic build</a>
1150work continued resulting in a lot of fixes.</p>
1151
1152<p>The android-specific <b>getprop</b>, <b>setprop</b>, <b>start</b>, and <b>stop</b>
1153commands were removed from toybox because they grew dependencies on android
1154libraries, and since toybox tries to avoid mandatory external dependencies
1155they moved to another package.</p>
1156
1157<p><u>Build</u>:
1158The new "make root" target builds a simple toybox root filesystem,
1159using scripts/mkroot.sh which is a stripped
1160down version of the external <a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a>
1161project merged into toybox. (Alas, at the moment it wants sh and route out
1162of pending, which aren't quite load bearing yet.)</p>
1163
1164<p>The new "scripts/mcm-buildall.sh" convenience script builds cross
1165compilers based on gcc+musl multiple targets (arm, x86, mips, m68k, s390,
1166microblaze...)
1167using <a href=https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>musl-cross-make</a>,
1168and a new scripts/cross.sh to easily cross compile for one or more targets
1169using the resulting compilers. (This works with "make root", "make
1170toybox", and other builds understanding the CROSS_COMPILE environment variable.)</p>
1171
1172<p>Setting the environment variable ASAN=1 enables the
1173llvm address sanitizer. (You may need to
1174export ASAN_SYMBOLIZER_PATH on debian to use it, they add the version number to
1175the filename in /usr/bin which confuses llvm.)</p>
1176
1177<p>Patrick Oppenlander fixed make -j (our make is a wrapper around
1178scripts/make.sh which was already doing a parallel build, but if you called
1179make with -j it wouldn't wait for make.sh to finish and the build broke).</b>
1180
1181<p>Lots of fixes for the MacOS build.</p>
1182
1183<p><u>New options</u>:
1184We upgraded <b>tar</b> to extract some older tarballs, <b>file</b> added -b and -s
1185options and can also recognize older tarballs,
1186some xz archives, .otf fonts, perf/simpleperf data files,
1187android boot images, and dtb files. Upgraded <b>file</b> to show the device type
1188for block and char devices, the target for symlinks, and it says _why_ it can't
1189open a file.</p>
1190
1191<p>Several commands ignore some options rather than erroring on them:
1192<b>patch</b> ignores the -f -g# and --no-backup-if-mismatch options
1193(all of which we were already doing by default anyway), and <b>xargs</b>
1194ignores -P# (which requests parallel execution, maybe add it later but
1195single threading works), and Denys Nykula made <b>wget</b> ignore
1196--no-check-ceritificate and <b>gzip</b> ignore -n (again, we weren't doing
1197either anyway) to satisfy pkgsrc.</p>
1198
1199<p>William Haddon taught <b>diff</b> and <b>patch</b> to support special characters in path
1200names (via quoting) and more timestamp formats.
1201Eric Molitor implemented <b>nl</b> -v (with negative and zero starting values),
1202and fixed a MacOS compatibility issue in the build scripts.
1203Tom Cherry added <b>netcat</b> -U (UNIX domain socket support).
1204Denys Nykula taught <b>wget</b> to call ftpget for ftp:// URLs.
1205Ethan Sommer added ln -t and rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty.
1206Elliott Hughes added <b>grep</b> -R, <b>killall</b> -w, tar --mode,
1207 fixed <b>ls</b> -Z and spacing in -lZ and --full-time,
1208added <b>xargs</b> --max-args and removed xargs -I (which we never actually
1209supported) and tweaked the size calculation to more closely match other
1210versions,
1211added xargs -o and made -p read from /dev/tty, added <b>blkid</b> -s, SEC_TYPE for ext3,
1212msdos, and ntfs, f2fs and ntfs LABEL, fixed vfat/ntfs UUID, and switched
1213the endianness for UUID of msdos/ntfs/vfat, simplified the octal mode
1214display in <b>lsof</b>, added <b>pidof</b> -x (thus making the default behavior _not_
1215be -x).</p>
1216
1217<p>When readdir() succeeds but stat() fails, <b>ls</b> now prints "??? ? ? filename"
1218entries instead of "cannot access" errors. (Still trying to make ls / on
1219android work more gracefully with the SELinux weirdness they added in 9.)</p>
1220
1221<p>Added %C to <b>stat</b> and made it show device type in its default output,
1222<b>cmp</b> now works
1223with 1 argument (implicit - as second argument reading from stdin).
1224<b>sed</b> added exit codes to the q command (q123), added Q, and fixed a
1225bad error message with "!".
1226Removed TAIL_SEEK config option (it just always does that now),
1227<b>find</b> grew several new options (%Z, -true, -false, and -newerXY), <b>ln</b> added -T.
1228The argument to <b>mktmp</b> --tmpdir is now optional.</p>
1229
1230<p><u>Bugfixes</u>:
1231The unshare probe bit-rotted so it was impossible to build <b>unshare</b>
1232and <b>nsenter</b> on some distros.
1233Commit 771e94e2a08 broke toybox's ability to say "unknown command" when
1234you pointed a symlink at it that it that didn't correspond to a command,
1235pointing a symlink at another symlink
1236to make toybox run a command under a name it doesn't recognize
1237(ln -s toybox sh; ln -s sh ash) had an off by one error,
1238<b>ifconfig</b> no longer error_exits if the "read mac address" ioctl fails (Android N
1239and later block that for non-root users to prevent device tracking).
1240When the libcrypto library was disabled, md5sum was building commands it
1241hasn't got built-in support for yet (like sha3sum) which acted like redundant
1242copies of md5sum,
1243<b>tar</b> wasn't correctly reading or writing sparse files with a hole at
1244the end, and tar tzf blah.tar.xz was calling xz when it meant xzcat,
1245<b>xargs</b> would spuriously fail on large memory systems (due to a missing
1246"unsigned" in a typecast),
1247<b>basename</b> can now remove suffixes starting with a dash,
1248<b>cp</b> -r unlinks() an existing symlink before trying to
1249recreate the symlink (otherwise cp -r into an existing directory will
1250try to follow the existing symlink and create another symlink at its
1251destination, failing if a file already exists there, which
1252was confusing gentoo's package manager), <b>timeout</b> now produces the
1253right exit code when the timed command intercepts the exit signal,
1254and <b>hostname</b> -d no longer segfaults on machines with no domain name.</p>
1255
1256<p>Denys Nykula fixed the <b>ftpget</b> freeze (it was sending REST instead
1257of RETR), made <b>mv</b> work with a trailing slash in the source,
1258fixed a <b>find</b> segfault,
1259and made <b>env</b> always exec rather than recursing to a builtin
1260(on the theory #!/usr/bin/env is expected to search the $PATH).</p>
1261
1262<p>Elliott improved <b>killall</b>'s handling of long filenames, made <b>kill</b> work
1263when killall5 is disabled (missing FORCE_FLAGS), fixed error reporting in
1264<b>hostname</b>, fixed several things in <b>xargs</b>,
1265made <b>printf</b> \c and \0 octal escapes work, fixed a <b>find</b> -name corner
1266case (find src/*.c -name file.c) and find dangling symlink behavior,
1267made some <b>rm</b> error messages consistent, fixed \x behavior in echo and
1268printf, fixed linestack.c's buffer length for utf8 U+XXXX escape printing,
1269fixed a race in <b>losetup</b>, fixed <b>grep</b> -F with multiple matches on the same
1270line and an -I failure in the existing grep tests, made <b>readlink</b> notice
1271when it has more than one argument, and made various
1272fixes to <b>modinfo</b>.</p>
1273
1274<p>Ethan Sommer reported that <b>stat</b> of an suid/sticky file output 5 digits of
1275octal stat date instead of 4.
1276Rob fixed an unaligned access in <b>grep</b>. Alessio Balsini removed an incorrect
1277null termination in <b>losetup</b>.
1278Jarno Mäkipää fixed <b>hexedit</b>
1279scrolling up and down on older terminals, and fixed <b>ls</b> segfaulting with a broken
1280(non-UTF8) locale (didn't expect wcrtomb to return -1).
1281Andrew Ilijic made ls put 2 spaces between columns like other implementations
1282(which helps when terminals get confused and apply UTF8 combining characters
1283to the space after a filename).
1284</p>
1285
1286<p><u>Library</u>:
1287Added dlist_lpop() to use a dlist as a stack (it removes the last entry
1288instead of the first), and dlist_pop() now works on a dlist_terminate()d list.
1289DIRTREE_STATLESS returns entries we couldn't stat() (with a zeroed ->st
1290field, and ->again |= 2), but filling in the file type from readdir().
1291Coversions between signal names and numbers now include all the Linux signals,
1292not just posix ones. The functions sig_to_num() and num_to_sig() moved into
1293lib/portability.h, because MacOS has different signals.
1294TOYFLAG_MAYFORK allows commands to run in toysh's process without forking,
1295but also makes them accessable from the toybox multiplexer or standalone.
1296A MAYFORK command has to clean up after itself (even in error paths) and
1297can't discard anything we need to keep (such as closing stdout).</p>
1298
1299<p>Elliott did a big xbind/xconnect cleanup (adding xbindany and xconnectany),
1300taught xregcomp that an empty regex matches the whole line
1301(because FreeBSD, and thus MacOS, doesn't already do that), and
1302replaced several uses of get_line() (which does single byte reads)
1303with getline() (which doesn't).</p>
1304
1305<p><u>Plumbing</u>:
1306"make clean" doesn't produce a screenful of unnecessary output now,
1307rm, ln, cp, kill, and netcat use the FLAG() macros now, makedevs uses the new
1308GLOBALS naming format, timeout now uses xwaitpid(), and we fixed an
1309off by one error in xwaitpid().</p>
1310
1311<p>Elliott removed a workaround for old NDK versions from getconf and
1312moved sort off of get_rawline() (which let us remove it).
1313Rob undid some loop unrolling in md5sum/sha1sum (we have libcrypto if you want
1314an assembly optimized version instead of an understandable version).</p>
1315
1316<p>Android ndk-r20 doesn't define the __ANDROID_NDK__ symbol, so we switched
1317to using clang's __has_include() (which is an undefined macro and thus a NOP
1318resolving to false on gcc).</p>
1319
1320<p><u>Pending</u>:
1321Rob did a lot of work on toysh: continuation support works (it knows when to ask
1322for another line of text and when to run what it's got), as do
1323nested if/else/elif statements, and while and for loops (supporting "for i"
1324and "for i in", but not for ((;;)) yet).
1325It parses pipes and redirections but doesn't perform them yet.
1326The next big todo chunk is environment variable resolution.
1327</p>
1328
1329<p>Gavin Howard fixed some bugs in bc, such as not returning error when raising
1330zero to a negative power.
1331Jarno Mäkipää continues to extend vi, adding yank and push, support for tabs,
1332rewriting delete, changing the drawing code, etc. Elliott also added several
1333fixes and features to vi,
1334fixed host to cope with large DNS responses, switched crontab to
1335use getline(), did work on man, fixed fixed several things in dd,
1336implemented diff --strip-trailing-cr and made diff not need /tmp.
1337Mike Bennett added extended attribute support to ip.c's route change.</p>
1338
1339<p><u>Test suite</u>: The killall and pgrep tests were having occasional
1340spurious failures due to a race condition (the test script would fork()
1341to call sleep and for just a moment there were two instances of the test
1342script, reporting an extra process if killall or pgrep ran then).
1343
1344<p>Elliott Hughes did a lot of work on the test suite: add kill -l tests,
1345make losetup.test notice (and skip) if loopback
1346devices area already in use, blkid.test can TEST_HOST e2fsprogs blkid now,
1347modinfo.test notices (and skips) if there's no /proc/modules or modules
1348directory, ifconfig.test skips if "dummy0 up" fails and disabled the
1349pointtopoint tests entirely (the kernel never supported it?),
1350truncate.test is less
1351confused by SELinux, hostname.test can run some tests as non-root,
1352addressed a race condition in killall.test on slow systems,
1353made chgrp.test, chown.test, and tar.test handle an empty /etc/passwd or /etc/group
1354(we were checking whether they were _there_ but some android devics have
1355empty ones),
1356fixed a couple things in env.test, extended killall.test to explicitly cover
1357long and short names (and not assume the shell is /bin/sh), taught split.test not to rely on bash process substitution,
1358added missing TZ=utc to touch.test,  fixed cp.test to pass for root
1359or with a restrictive umask, and fixed the FAILCOUNT arithmetic to use more portable
1360$(()). Elliott also made some tests more flexible (find.test can handle any
1361error message about symlink loops, etc), and disabled others (such as du)
1362when SELinux is enabled.</p>
1363
1364<p>Rob taught testcmd not to use the shell builtin for TEST_HOST unless there
1365isn't one in the $PATH, work if $PWD has a space in it,
1366and make kill.test stop testing the shell builtin
1367insead of the command, quieted tests that were producing output
1368other than their PASS/FAIL line, and made NOSPACE tests ignore the
1369presence/absence of leading/trailing whitespace as well as differences
1370in the amount of space.</p>
1371
1372<p><u>Documentation</u>:
1373The <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> got freshened up a bit, with updates
1374for android from Elliott.
1375In <a href=design.html>the design page</a> the Features section starts with
13764 new paragraphs about the scope of toybox, and a new License section talks
1377about 0BSD.
1378The "./toybox --help" output now explains how to do install_flat by hand.</p>
1379
1380<p><u>Sheer pedantry</u>:
1381Elliott fixed a double close in loopfiles_lines() so strace doesn't
1382have an EBADF in it, and added a missing "static" in lib/net.c.</p>
1383
1384<a name="21-05-2019" /><a href="#21-05-2019"><hr><h2><b>May 21, 2019</b></h2></a>
1385<blockquote>
1386<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>
1387</blockquote>
1388
1389<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.1</a>
1390(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.1>git commit</a>)
1391is out.</p>
1392
1393<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>
1394(meaning Android is building under toybox, which is halfway to Android
1395building 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>
1396
1397<p><u>New commands</u>: Isaac Dunham added <b>mcookie</b>, which is used by
1398X11. Elliott Hughes added <b>devmem</b>, which replaces toolbox's "r".</p>
1399
1400<p><u>Promoted</u>: <b>tar</b>, <b>gunzip</b>, and <b>zcat</b> were cleaned
1401up and moved out of pending.
1402Tar is a near-rewrite with support for --owner --group and --sparse,
1403capable of autodetecting "wget blah.tar.bz2 -O - | tar xv", a --restrict option
1404that only allows files to extract into a single subdirectory, and so on.</p>
1405
1406<p><u>Added to pending</u>:
1407Jarno Mäkipää contributed a new <b>vi</b> implementation. Makepost added
1408<b>man</b>.</p>
1409
1410<p><u>Updates</u>: Elliott added <b>find</b> -wholename/-iwholename, -printf,
1411and -context, <b>grep</b> --exclude-dir, and <b>echo</b> -E.
1412Rob added <b>blkid</b> -U and -L, <b>mount</b> now has UUID= support via blkid -U,
1413you can now specify TZ="blah" in the <b>date</b> -d input string (although
1414why the double quotes are required is an open question), and <b>sed</b> now
1415understands ,+N relative ranges. Makepost added <b>rm</b> -v.
1416The human_readable fields in <b>ps</b>/<b>top</b>/<b>iotop</b> now use all
1417available space to show more precision, <b>iotop</b> displays swap bandwidth
1418properly (it was showing a signed field as unsigned), and
1419<b>touch</b> -t and -d autodetect the time format.</p>
1420
1421<p><u>Cleanups</u>: In pending Rob did some bc cleanup,
1422Colin Davidson did some arp cleanup, 
1423Uros Prestor fixed route argument parsing, and
1424in bc Daniel Rosenberg fixed bc_vec_concat()'s allocation and
1425Gavin Howard fixed an overflow bug in bc_num_ulong().</p>
1426
1427<p>Elliott made scan_key() detect cursor keys and such with several more
1428terminal types, made more better about directories and non-tty output,
1429cleaned up inconsistent uses of ARRAY_LEN(), taught file
1430to recognize a c-sky ELF machine, and fixed timezone and daylight
1431savings time issues in date and its tests.
1432Rob simplified netcat and ping using new lib/net.c infrastructure.
1433When run as non-PID 1 (for a chroot) oneit's exit code now indicates
1434which signal it's exiting due to.
1435Hadrian Węgrzynowski #defined constants for mkpathat.
1436Date now uses the current time for unspecified fields (instead of zeroing
1437them), and should set the weekday properly.
1438Sort's -k2.3,4.5 syntax is now documented and behaves more closely to
1439other implementations (silly as that behavior is).
1440Significant speedup to sed s/a/b/g on a megabyte long line (it was
1441O(n^2) and now it's quite snappy).</p>
1442
1443<p>Several cases of warning about stdout failing to write were silenced
1444because things like piping the output to head means stdout is a special
1445case: its output is often discarded and that's fine. And xprintf()
1446and friends only checks stdout for errors so it can exit early ("yes | head"
1447should not spin endlessly) without actually flushing anything.
1448There's an ongoing design debate about line buffering stdin and stdout
1449that'll have to be resolved next dev cycle.</p>
1450
1451<p><u>Bugs</u>:
1452Elliott sent in a lot of fixes for building AOSP with toybox:
1453support for more date formats, sed substitution of empty capture groups
1454and an endless loop with -EPIPE, fixed find -path/-ipath, made loggit()
1455only feed LOG_AUTH to syslog when we have a tty, gave grep a bunch
1456of --longname synonyms for short options, added getfattr --only-values,
1457and timeout --foreground --preserve-status and --signal.</p>
1458
1459<p>Top got a lot of tweaks: it no longer collates thread's CPU usage into the
1460parent thread (in -H mode), hides the cursor in interactive mode, updates the
1461display properly in batch mode, and accepts ENTER
1462as a synonym for SPACE when refreshing the display. The header lines
1463now abbreviate long numbers with units (via human_readable()),
1464more reliably spans the terminal width, and says "Thread" instead
1465of "Task" when it's showing threads. The task/thread count now adds up
1466(understanding more kernel states and treating unknown ones as "sleeping").
1467Top now treats -o "" as an error (previously it displayed an empty screen).</p>
1468
1469<p>William Djupström pointed out login needs to chown() the tty, and made it
1470clear the environment when -p is absent.
1471Vidar Holen fixed inverted find -exec exit status.
1472Rob made chgrp() stop relying on libc's printf("%s", NULL) printing "(null)"
1473because a <a href=https://github.com/varnishcache/varnish-cache/issues/2879>newly added gcc bug</a> turns that into a build break, and
1474fixed an outright embarassing xstrndup() bug.
1475Liwugang fixed a segfault when stat's format string had a trailing %.
1476A missing else in grep meant -x was sometimes ignored.</p>
1477
1478<p><u>Infrastructure</u>:
1479in the build scripts/portability.sh now tests that the compiler it's trying
1480to use exists up front. We no longer link against librt because on glibc that's
1481pulling in libpthread for some unknown reason.</p>
1482
1483<p>TOYFLAG_ARGFAIL() lets commands return custom exit values when option parsing
1484fails (because AOSP build scripts cared), so timeout --unknown returns 125
1485and so on: chroot, diff, cmp, env, grep, nohup, and sort also use it now with
1486various values.</p>
1487
1488<p>New FLAG() macros: FLAG(x) expands to (toys.optflags&FLAG_x) and returns
1489zero if the command line argument's bit isn't set and nonzero if it is
1490(meaning -x was or wasn't encountered on the command line this time by
1491lib/args.c). Lots of commands got converted to use them.</p>
1492
1493<p>New lib/env.c with reset_env(), xsetenv(), and xunsetenv() which frees
1494the old environment variable when it wasn't inherited from exec(). This
1495lets long-running loops reset environment variables without memory leaks.</p>
1496
1497<p>New xnotify() plumbing in lib/portability.c with Linux and Mac versions
1498(which should also work on BSD).</p>
1499
1500<p>New xparsedate() and xvali_date() functions allow date, tar --mtime, and
1501touch to understand the same date formats,
1502xpopen_both() now knows how to use existing filehandles for the child's
1503stdin/stdout, and no longer redirects stderr (which hides errors),
1504new nanomove(), nanodiff(), union socksaddr, xrecvwait(),
1505and human_readable_long() to show more than 3 digits of output.</p>
1506
1507<p>Taught xgetaddrinfo() to return a wildcard address for a NULL host,
1508xconnbind() sets SO_REUSEADDR by default,
1509fileunderdir() returns the abspath to the file now (since we had to work
1510it out anyway), and
1511xabspath() uses O_PATH now (because Android's SELinux rules got more aggressive).</p>
1512
1513<p>Several new xsendfile() variants, including sendfile_len() to copy
1514a specific amount of data and xsendfile_pad() to append zeroes to the
1515output when there isn't enough input.</p>
1516
1517<p>regexec0() is now using libc's REG_STARTEND supported by every libc out
1518there _except_ musl. (It originated in BSD and was adopted by glibc, bionic,
1519and uClibc 15 years ago, and is also supported in macosx. Musl's maintainer
1520<a href=https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2013/01/15/26>turned down</a>
1521the feature request as an invalid use case he didn't think they should
1522be trying to do.)</p>
1523
1524<p><u>Docs</u>:
1525the <a href=license.html>license page</a> now has an SPDX identifier, and links to more
1526history/context. The actual LICENSE file had its title line removed
1527so <a href=https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/pull/643#issuecomment-463746027>github could recognize it</a> as 0BSD. (We're still waiting for
1528"<a href=https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/pull/643#issuecomment-464380789>a while</a>" to pass before github actually does, though.)</p>
1529
1530<p>A new www/doc/mount.txt file describes how mount works under the covers.</p>
1531
1532<p>Rob consistently misspelled "canonical" and "millisecond", mountpoint
1533has a synopsis now,
1534Kevin van der Kamp fixed a typo in netstat's help text, and Elliott
1535Hughes fixed typos everywhere and made the tense, capitalization, and
1536punctuation of help text more consistent.</p>
1537
1538<p>New paragraph in the code style part of design.html explaining that
1539"char* a, b;" is not how C works, and since you wind up with "char *a, b;"
1540anyway you might as well say that.</p>
1541
1542<p>Given dreamhost's tendency to repeatedly delete the mailing list
1543archive, the nav bar on the left links to a backup web archive now too.</p>
1544
1545<p>The FAQ now says why we do time based releases.</p>
1546
1547<p><u>Testing</u>: Added VERBOSE=nopass to not show passing tests.
1548The test suite now does an rm -rf on testdir between each command so
1549debris files don't accumulate.
1550New skipnot function skips the next test if a command line fails, and
1551toyonly function only runs command when we're testing the toybox version
1552of command. (This isn't the same as TEST_HOST, the host version could be
1553toybox.)
1554The find -newer test calls "sleep .1" to avoid intermittently failing with an
1555identical timestamp.
1556Elliott added the start of a file.test rogues gallery.
1557No longer call lsattr in "make tests" because the behavior differs by
1558filesystem and it needs fixing somehow.</p>
1559
1560<a name="08-02-2019" /><a href="#08-02-2019"><hr><h2><b>February 8, 2019</b></h2></a>
1561<blockquote>
1562<p>"Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified
1563Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and
1564in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have
1565been left blank to save on printing costs."</p>
1566<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
1567</blockquote>
1568
1569<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.0</a>
1570(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.0>git commit</a>)
1571is out.</p>
1572
1573<p>Toybox now builds on MacOS and FreeBSD, thanks to the efforts of Elliott
1574Hughes and Ed Maste respectively. Use the "make macos_defconfig" and "make
1575freebsd_defconfig" targets to enable the set of commands that compile on
1576each so far.</p>
1577
1578<p><u>New commands</u>: Added an <b>sntp</b> client/server (RFC 4330 Simple Network Time
1579Protocol, a compatible subset of ntp). The <b>test</b> command was rewritten
1580and promoted out of pending.</p>
1581
1582<p><u>New options</u>: <b>grep</b> now has --color, supports embedded NUL bytes in its input,
1583recognizes binary files, and passes all of grep.test (in case you
1584needed the middle numerical field of -bB, etc).
1585Josh Gao added ipv6 and UDP support to <b>netcat</b>.
1586Volodymyr Medvid reported that install -d doesn't honor -o or -g.
1587Elliott Hughes did a lot of work to support hermetic Android/AOSP builds:
1588<b>mkdir</b> accepts both --parent and --parents as synonyms for -p, <b>touch</b> ignores -f,
1589<b>basename</b> added -s to remove a trailing suffix, <b>dirname</b> now supports multiple
1590arguments, <b>cmp</b> accepts --quiet and --silent as synonyms for -s, <b>hostname</b>
1591added -sfd, <b>head</b> added --bytes as a synonym for -c and --lines as a synonym
1592for -n, <b>mktemp</b> added -t and fixed -u, <b>sed</b> added -z and -iEXT to keep backup files,
1593<b>md5sum</b> and sha1sum added --status and --check as synonyms -s and -c,
1594<b>readlink</b> added --canonicalize as a synonym for -f, <b>sort</b> grew -V,
1595<b>patch</b> added -s its synonym --quiet, <b>stat</b> added --format as
1596a synonym for -c, <b>xargs</b> added -p -t -r,
1597Eduardas Meile asked
1598that <b>umount</b> ignore -c. Reverend Homer added a small optimization to file.c,
1599and Elliott taught <b>file</b> to recognize riscv ELF binaries. Peter Collingbourne
1600taught <b>ls</b> -t to use the nanoseconds field.
1601<b>patch</b> has better support for patching a file with a tab in the name.</p>
1602
1603<p><u>Bugfixes</u>:
1604<b>cp</b> --preserve was segfaulting when you didn't specify _what_ to
1605preserve (it now correctly defaults to "mot") and didn't get the permissions
1606right when copying a symlink's contents as a regular file,
1607<b>sort</b> -x didn't work when
1608attached to a key, <b>host</b> didn't allocate a big enough buffer for worst
1609case ipv6 address size, <b>sed</b> needed a ; between b and } when other
1610implementations don't (we're already well past what posix says but a script
1611out in the field broke...),
1612and several fixes to <b>hostname</b> in a container, <b>ps</b>/<b>top</b> were
1613misreading the VIRT and SHM fields.</p>
1614
1615<p><u>Pending</u>: Gavin Howard updated <b>bc</b> and added more tests,
1616Marius Adaskevicius pointed out <b>mdev</b> -s should follow symlinks,
1617Yangchun Fu reported a <b>dhcp</b> checksum bug, <b>modprobe</b> needed errno reset
1618to avoid reporting spurious errors in verbose mode and no longer
1619exits with status 1 if it can't find /etc/modprobe.conf, the <b>more</b> command
1620wasn't always flushing stdout when it exited.</p>
1621
1622<p><u>Build</u>:
1623<b>chrt</b> no longer #warns about the musl sched_get_priority_min() bug, but
1624instead works around it.
1625We were mixing setjmp/siglongjmp (harmless in some contexts but it kind
1626of annoyed FreeBSD), and
1627make install_airlock now adds sha256sum (because the Linux 4.20 build now
1628needs that for the s390x target).</p>
1629
1630<p><u>Coding style</u>:
1631Rob converted the rest of the option GLOBALS() to the new single letter
1632coding style, and the new FLAG(x) macro is a slightly tidier way to say
1633"toys.optflags&FLAG_x".
1634Removed CFG_SORT_BIG (the sort command always
1635has the full functionality now. The general future direction or toybox
1636is to either have a command or not have it; multiple versions of the
1637same command aren't worth the complexity in testing, documentation,
1638or system adminstration).</p>
1639
1640<p><u>Library code</u>:
1641The mkflags plumbing can now support arbitrary punctuation as option
1642names via an escape syntax (because mkfs.vfat specifies an offset with -@),
1643and lib/args.c now only sets FLAGS_NODASH when the first argument
1644didn't have a dash (allowing "ps ax" and "ps -ax" to behave differently).</p>
1645
1646<p>Added an xrename() function,
1647xchdir() has better error reporting, xconnect()/xbind() had their
1648implementations merged, xsendto() moved from ping to lib, xpoll() now
1649measures elapsed time and only waits for the remaining period when restarted,
1650and Eduardas Meile converted several error_exit() to error_exit_raw() (because
1651yocto 2.6 buils with -Werror=format-security by default).</p>
1652
1653<p>There's a scripts/portability.sh now which lets the build use gsed and gmake
1654(when available) in more places to avoid broken host versions on MacOS and FreeBSD.
1655The syntax of the "noreturn" attribute
1656changed slightly, some calls to strnstr() were replaced with strcasestr(),
1657we work around MacOS' lack of features.h, portability.h can now do Apple's
1658endianness macros, and so on.</p>
1659
1660<p>Following the <a href=faq.html#support_horizon>seven year rule</a>
1661Elliott removed support or glibc 2.10, and also
1662reformatted a lot of --help text for consistency (removing trailing
1663periods and such).</p>
1664
1665<p><u>Test suite</u>:
1666The test suite now has its own version of "pending", specifically "make tests"
1667skips test files without the executable bit set (unless you export $TEST_ALL).
1668This eliminates "expected failures" (I.E. files with unresolved todo items)
1669from the global regression test. Additional tests can be added to the global
1670regression test with chmod +x as the todo items they document get resolved.</p>
1671
1672<p>Several places the test suite got fluffed out, including guards to skip
1673root-only tests when run as a normal user. The testcmd function prints the
1674short name instead of the full path to the command.
1675The tests for the test command
1676("test.test") no longer test the shell builtin but correctly test the
1677toybox command. (Now say that ten times fast.)</p>
1678
1679<p>Bash version skew required replacing "continue" with "return" to stop
1680tests early in bash 4.4 (for VERBOSE=fail).</p>
1681
1682
1683<a name="31-10-2018" /><a href="#31-10-2018"><hr><h2><b>October 31, 2018</b></h2></a>
1684<blockquote><p>
1685"In the beginning the Universe was created.
1686This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
1687</p>
1688</blockquote>
1689
1690<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.8.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.8</a>
1691(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.8>git commit</a>)
1692is out (a month late).</p>
1693
1694<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.
1695You have to add an "llvm-cc" symlink to "clang", then use CROSS_COMPILE=llvm-
1696with the appropriate $PATH (or absolute path in CROSS_COMPILE) for the
1697target you want to build for. (To run it on a non-android host, you probably
1698want "LDFLAGS=--static" too.)</p>
1699
1700<p><u>New commands</u>: <b>i2cdetect</b>, <b>i2cdump</b>, <b>i2cget</b>, and <b>i2cset</b>
1701courtesy of Elliott/Android. The <b>watch</b> command got a complete (tty-aware)
1702rewrite, and was promoted out of pending. The <b>prlimit</b> command is back
1703(a configuration bug was always disabling it), and <b>ascii</b> now defaults y
1704in defconfig (an oversight).</p>
1705
1706<p><u>New options</u>: 
1707The <b>ifconfig</b> command added -S (short view) giving one line of
1708information per interface, in "name ipv4/mask macaddr [ipv6/mask@type...]"
1709format. <b>grep</b> grew binary file detection, with -I and -a options to
1710ignore them or force treating them as ascii (really utf8).
1711Zach Van Rijn asked for <b>find -empty</b>.
1712In the <b>file</b> command, Elliott improved java
1713.class support and added .wav, .bmp, and android .dex.
1714Elliott also added "getconf -a" and a lot of missing getconf symbols the
1715AOSP build uses, including support for pathconf(3) symbols requiring two
1716arguments. This means getconf's arguments work more like ubuntu's
1717now (one or two arguments, not iterating through the supplied list and
1718processing each like last release), and -l grew section identifiers (so
1719the "getconf -l" output is no longer a directly consumable list of symbols
1720it takes).
1721Command line options specifying durations (like top -d or ping -i) can
1722now use fractions and units, like "1.5" and ".1m". See "toybox --help" for
1723details.
1724Toybox now dereferences one layer of symlinks if it doesn't recognize the
1725name it's called under (so if you "ln -s $(which sleep) blah" and then
1726"./blah 30", it should figure out you mean sleep 30).</p>
1727
1728<p><u>Pending</u>:
1729Gavin Howard contributed a large new <b>bc</b> implementation to pending,
1730which covers everything the kernel build needs (and more) but is going to
1731take a while to review.
1732In <b>diff</b> the android guys added --color and timestamps on the
1733+++/--- lines. In <b>mdev</b> Faustas Azuolas Bagdonas added support
1734for mdev.conf's fourth field. Reverend Homer suggested an error message
1735improvement in <b>wget</b>, Kevin Spiteri did a cleanup pass on test.c,
1736and there was a cleanup pass on the passwd command.</p>
1737
1738<p><u>Bugfixes</u>:
1739Elliott responded to a bug in <b>getconf</b>'s sed-based header generation by
1740replacing it with a more conventional array of #defined symbols, with #ifdefs
1741for missing symbols on the three libc implementations (glibc, bionic, musl)
1742we've tested so far. (This requires portability.h work to add new supported
1743build environments, but at least it works on bionic now.)
1744The <b>file</b> command now fails gracefully when reading pathologically
1745broken ELF files (the tests for integer overflow missed one), and
1746<b>date</b> no longer shows a meaningless errno when it can't parse the
1747date format.
1748Several fixes in <b>ping</b> (-w and -W didn't work, -c kept sending packets
1749while waiting for replies, and when no reply packets were received the summary
1750data was printed twice).
1751Elliott fixed <b>wc</b> column widths (traditional reality doesn't match
1752posix), fixed <b>modprobe</b>'s error handling (reported by Wen Xie), and
1753also fixed the units on blockdev --blkraget (reported by Martijn Coenen).
1754Several small fixes to the <b>stat</b> command's output (help text, quoting
1755style, leading zeroes, switch -f from %t to %T), <b>oneit</b> no longer
1756reboots the system when it's not called as PID 1.
1757Last release's commit letting $STRIP be redefined had a typo.
1758Nick Kralevich added an istty() check before calling TIOCGWINSZ (which
1759triggered Android's strict ioctl filtering on non-filesystem fifos).
1760An unstripped build (where the "strip" command fails for a given
1761CROSS_COMPILE) will now overwrite the (read-only) output file instead of
1762failing a rebuild. The dirtree plumbing no longer prints a "No" on front
1763of the filename in error messages (such as "permission denied").</p>
1764
1765<p><u>Docmentation</u>
1766Elliott updated the roadmap with Android AOSP status, towards turning that
1767into a hermetic build (hopefully with an eventual self-hosting option, work
1768is <a href=b33d37d6f735>already underway</a> on the airlock step).
1769Rob added a little more context for LSB and described the move from Aboriginal
1770Linux to mkroot.
1771The <b>ps</b> help text changed: now "ps -o help" shows the fields and the normal
1772--help is much more manageable. Ifconfig's --help text also got tidied up.
1773Our LICENSE file has the SPDX identifier (0BSD) now, and the note about
1774the kconfig/ subdirectory still having (build only, non-shipping) GPL code
1775in it moved into the kconfig subdirectory.</p>
1776
1777<p><u>Coding style change:</u>
1778GLOBALS() now uses the argument letter as the variable
1779name for variables automatically set by command line arguments via lib/args.c,
1780and no longer requires they be one per line.
1781Removed use of the gcc
1782\e extension in string constants, replacing it with \033.</p>
1783
1784<p><u>Library code:</u>
1785lib/interestingtimes.c was renamed to lib/tty.c.
1786The deflate code from toys/pending/compress.c moved to lib/deflate.c,
1787which gunzip.c now uses when it's not configured to use zlib. (This reduces
1788the bootstrap dependencies for the "airlock" step of a hermetic build.)
1789The compression side remains a todo item.
1790Added "%" to lib/args.c reading seconds (including fractions/units) into a
1791long milliseconds argument. Redid xparsetime() to not need floating point,
1792added xparsemillitime() for milliseconds common case, and
1793parsetime() now treats leading garbage as an error instead of returning zero.
1794The bufgetpwuid()/pufgetgrgid() functons can now handle more than 4k of group
1795data. The set_terminal() function can now set serial speed, and microcom.c
1796uses it. Added xsignal_flags(), and more consistently use xsignal() (which wraps
1797sigaction()) instead of signal().
1798A new xgetrandom() function calls the new getrandom() system call, falling
1799back to /dev/urandom on older kernel/libc (made to actually _work_ by
1800Patrick Oppenlander).</p>
1801
1802<p><u>Build infrastructure:</u>
1803Updated dependency detection so "make distclean defconfig toybox" now works
1804all on the same command line. (This is nice when $CROSS_COMPILE changes).
1805scripts/config2help.c no longer includes parts of lib/ and just copies what
1806it needs into itself, improving build portability.
1807The build now checks the specified cross compiler exists, hopefully providing
1808a more informative error message when it doesn't. Similarly, when .config is
1809missing the error message suggests running make defconfig.</p>
1810
1811<a name="23-06-2018" /><a href="#23-06-2018"><hr><h2><b>June 23, 2018</b></h2></a>
1812<blockquote>
1813<p>There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what
1814the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be
1815replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another
1816theory which states that this has already happened.</p>
1817<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
1818</blockquote>
1819
1820<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.7.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.7</a>
1821(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.7>git commit</a>)
1822is out.</p>
1823
1824<p><u>New commands</u>: Rob Landley added <b>getconf</b>, Elliott Hughes added
1825<b>uuidgen</b>, and <b>ping</b> and <b>fmt</b> were promoted out of pending.</p>
1826
1827<p><u>New options</u>: The <b>cp</b> command added the --parents option,
1828<b>readlink</b> now has -m to show where a missing path would be,
1829<b>netstat</b> got some updates (better nommu support, it can use /etc/services
1830names, more command line options are bounds checked),
1831Ng Zhi An added --getra and --setra (get/set readahead) to <b>blockdev</b>,
1832Elliott Hughes added <b>xxd</b> -o and made <b>top</b> -d understand fractional
1833sections (because the Linux Test Project uses that), and
1834Minghui Liu added <b>watch</b> -b.</p>
1835
1836<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: Several fixes to <b>vmstat</b>: Elliott Hughes made it work on a
183748-core machine
1838and fixed a glitch with -n, Haroon Maqsood pointed out "vmstat 1 1" didn't
1839stop and "vmstat -n" didn't print the first theader line.
1840Minghui Liu fixed a bug where <b>cp</b> -p didn't preserve
1841timestamps, and pointed out the b, c, and d suffixes on numbers weren't
1842working. Ryan Pritchard pointed out that <b>du</b> -d0 should act like du -s.
1843Filip Perich made an RFC2347 OACK compliance fix to <b>tftp</b> in pending.
1844Zach van Rijn fixed a bug in <b>xxd</b> causing incorrect translation of
1845uppercase characters.
1846Elliott fixed several things in <b>top</b> (removed spurious '\r' characters from -b
1847output, removed interactive flicker, made running processes bold), and
1848pushed Rob to make <b>file</b> work better recognizing things on stdin
1849("cat /bin/ls | file -" still won't work but "file - < /bin/ls" should).
1850Rob fixed a bug in <b>netstat</b> on 64 bit big endian systems,
1851and fixed <b>cut</b> -DF
1852(a posix compliance fix broke its ability to act as a decent awk replacment
1853because outputting all delimiterless lines isn't what you want there, -D
1854now disables that too).</p>
1855</u></p>
1856
1857<p><u>Documentation</u>: Rob added a buildroot section to the roadmap with the
1858prequisites that needs to run, and reformatted more of the ps --help text
1859to two columns.</p>
1860
1861<p><u>Library</u>:
1862FLAGS_NODASH is now set in toys.optargs when an optstring starting
1863with & has no dash in its first argument. (This lets "ps -ax" and "ps ax"
1864behave differently.) Factored out xtestfile() into lib/.
1865The comma-separated-list parsing infrastructure moved to lib/commas.c.
1866Added mkpath() for the common case of mkpathat() and #defined MKPATHAT_*
1867constants for the uncommon cases. Elliott added better error checking
1868to xparsetime() and fixed a bug in names_to_pid() (used in <b>pidof</b>
1869and <b>killall</b> and such).
1870Rob inlined the old toys/e2fs.h into pending's mke2fs,
1871and removed a rogue semicolon from the WOULD_EXIT() macro that screwed
1872up if() statement levels. The do_lines() semantics changed adding a
1873callback(0,0) at the end of each file.</p>
1874
1875<p><u>Tests</u>:
1876The test_* commands under toys/example were all renamed demo_* so
1877they don't share a namespace with running a standalone command
1878through the test suite (ala "make test_sed"), then
1879demo_human_readable became demo_number so it can also test atolx()
1880suffixes. The readlink.test was getting confused by a
1881behavior difference between toybox and ubuntu (Ubuntu's ln -sf wouldn't
1882replace a symlink that pointed to itself, toybox's would), now there's
1883an explicit rm so it works on ubuntu too. The test suite plumbing's
1884error message for a test with the wrong number of arguments now
1885correctly identifies which test it's complaining about, and it can now
1886run a test on a command name beginning with "-" (none yet but it
1887comes up in toysh).</p>
1888
1889<p><u>Building</u>: You can now override strip with $STRIP. The set of
1890"make install_airlock" commands got tweaked for the 4.17 kernel (which
1891needs bison and flex because the new kconfig plumbing doesn't have _shipped
1892versions of those generated files like the old kconfig did), and for
1893the new release (remove ping, toybox provides it now).
1894$LDFLAGS now applies to library probing (the android NDK provides
1895dynamic libraries without corresponding --static versions).
1896Elliott took a CFG_TOYBOX_DEBUG check out of an error_exit() to make
1897clang stop complaining about an error that should never happen.</p>
1898
1899<a name="24-02-2018" /><a href="#24-02-2018"><hr><h2><b>February 24, 2018</b></h2></a>
1900<blockquote><p>
1901"Arthur," said Ford.<br />
1902"Hello? Yes?" said Arthur.<br />
1903"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."<br />
1904"Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that."<br />
1905</p>
1906<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
1907</blockquote>
1908
1909<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.6.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.6</a>
1910(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.6>git commit</a>)
1911is out, a month and change late.</p>
1912
1913<p>This release adds a <b>crc32</b> command and
1914cleans up and promotes <b>iconv</b>, <b>logger</b>, and <b>setfattr</b>.
1915Pending added <b>stty</b> and <b>fmt</b>, the other half of <b>ping</b>,
1916and got a lot of cleanup on <b>gzip</b>/<b>gunzip</b>/<b>zcat</b>.</p>
1917
1918<p>The <b>cut</b> command got a complete rewrite adding support for multiple
1919ranges, utf8/unicode characters, and new -CDFO options. Use -C to measure
1920columns rather than characters (for double width chars), and "cut -DF 3-5"
1921selects words (like "awk '{print $3 $4 $5}'").</p>
1922
1923<p>This release adds <b>top -m</b> and <b>iotop -H</b> (and fixed top width truncating for narrow terminal windows),
1924added <b>iconv -c</b>, fixed <b>ps -T 1234</b> to show threads belonging to
1925that PID, improved <b>file</b>'s executable identification (properly recognizing
1926both endiannesses and adding sh/frv fdpic, bpf, and new microblaze
1927identifiers), and <b>blkid</b> now only shows LABEL= when it isn't blank.</p>
1928
1929<p>Running ./configure now does "make defconfig", help_exit() now shows the
1930"See %s --help" message on the same line, and several web pages
1931(about, code, roadmap, cleanup) got updates.</p>
1932
1933<p>Elliott and the Android devs added <b>df -i</b>, <b>uptime -p</b>,
1934<b>time -v</b>, and <b>xxd -i -ri</b>,
1935fixed <b>id -G</b> to only output the group IDs, fixed the <b>xargs -0 -n</b>
1936combination, made <b>find -exec +</b> obey ARG_MAX (just like xargs), made
1937<b>killall</b> kill scripts too, fixed an off by one error in <b>pidof</b>
1938that could cause false positive matches in 15 character names, added
1939gzip/gunzip/zcat tests, and taught <b>file</b> to identify more stuff
1940(ogg, TrueType font, LLVM bitcode, PEM certs, and PE executables), and
1941for some reason needed TOYBOX_VENDOR in the version stuff.
1942Android <b>getprop</b>/<b>setprop</b> now allows ro. properties to have
1943arbitrary lengths, <b>losetup</b> can now find loop devices under /dev/block (where android puts
1944them for historical reasons), and Andreas Gampe pointed out a thinko in
1945<b>top</b> that triggered llvm's address sanitizer checks.</p>
1946
1947<p>Gael PORTAY asked for mdev to work when Linux has the
1948block layer configured out, Patrick Oppenlander pointed out a problem
1949with make bloatcheck's build dependencies, and
1950xuphung on github fixed config2help building on MacOS X.</p>
1951
1952<p>Commands with locale support now setlocale(LC_TYPE, "C.UTF-8") for more
1953targeted locale support (enable character parsing with
1954utf8 support, use "C" semantics otherwise). The toys/example/test_*.c
1955commands got renamed demo_*.c.</p>
1956
1957<p>In lib.c the millitime() function returns current unix time in milliseconds
1958(which as a 64 bit number is good for + or - 292 million years from
1959midnight Jan 1 1970), and the old xgetty() function became tty_fd() returning
1960-1 instead of erroring out.</p>
1961
1962<p>The "make help" text moved from the Makefile to scripts/help.txt,
1963ls.c now lists some of its deviations from posix, and work is underway
1964to make ps.c more intelligible (and figure out how to break it up into
1965multiple files).</p>
1966
1967<a name="12-10-2017" /><a href="#12-10-2017"><hr><h2><b>October 12, 2017</b></h2></a>
1968<blockquote><p>Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went
1969mad now?</p>
1970<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
1971</blockquote>
1972
1973<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.5.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.5</a>
1974(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.5>git commit</a>)
1975is out.</p>
1976
1977<p>This is another <b>mostly bugfix release</b>. I delayed it a bit trying to get some
1978of the many half-finished projects (dd, ping, lsof, iconv, cut, sysconf,
1979the cp --parents option...) finished/promoted/tested, but decided adding big
1980things at the end of the dev cycle would be too destabilizing.</p>
1981
1982<p>A couple <b>new features</b> slipped in anyway. Ilya Kuzmich added head -c
1983and strings -t (and corrected strings' output in a couple places). Elliott
1984Hughes taught file to recognize Macintosh (Mach-O) binaries.</p>
1985
1986<p><b>NOTE</b>: the chrt command is broken when built against musl-libc
1987because that project's maintainer decided he didn't like the system calls
1988it depends on, so he
1989<a href=https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/commit/?id=1e21e78bf7a5>removed
1990them from his libc</a>. The prebuilt binaries are built against musl,
1991so the chrt command there will always say -ENOSYS. (It works fine built against
1992glibc, and presumably bionic or uClibc.)</p>
1993
1994<p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Remounting (mount -o remount,rw) should work properly now,
1995and we fixed another place ps was segfaulting when /proc
1996entries vanished out from under us (a hard to hit race condition
1997mostly noticeable in long-running "top" exiting; error value was treated
1998as a pointer). Elliott Hughes fixed a -Wformat warning in expr.c,
1999and made xargs split the command
2000line at ARG_MAX (which is 1/4 the stack size ulimit, which normal users
2001can arbitrarily increase but execve() will complain if they don't).
2002Josh Gao made netcat -l exit after handling a request, and reported a
2003seq bug (seq "1000000 10000001" output 1e+06, fixed now). Zach Riggle fixed a
2004broken URL in the README. Rob fixed env -0 checking the flag wrong so
2005it didn't work in combination with other flags (typo).</p>
2006
2007<p><b>Plumbing</b>:
2008Replaced mbrtowc() with a new utf8towc() that doesn't have a context
2009struct or care about locale. A bugfix in comma_scan() (wasn't removing an entry at the end
2010of the list) is why remount _sometimes_ worked (depending on argument
2011order), xgetaddrinfo() is now separate from xconnect(),
2012atolx_range() learned the w (word=2) suffix, and b is now (block=512) instead
2013of (byte=1).</p>
2014
2015<p><b>Build</b>: Patrick Oppenlander added a workaround for a bug in config2help.c
2016that resulted in segfaults on newer toolchains. (It was actually a use
2017after free error; the build infrastructure isn't nearly as heavily audited as
2018code that gets installed on the target; oops.) A new GITHASH
2019environment variable can force the build version from
2020the command line, and the build checks for .git in the top directory
2021before asking git what our version is (so it isn't confused by ../../.git
2022in an enclosing directory). Added a build #warning about musl intentionally
2023breaking chrt (as with nommu fork() musl now provides a broken
2024stub function so compile-time probes for its existence think it's there, and
2025you can't run the result to test behavior when cross compiling).</p>
2026
2027<a name="19-06-2017" /><a href="#19-06-2017"><hr><h2><b>June 19, 2017</b></h2></a>
2028<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.
2029To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.</p>
2030<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
2031</blockquote>
2032
2033<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.4.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.4</a>
2034(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.4>git commit</a>)
2035is out. No new commands this time, but
2036<b>chrt</b> and <b>dmesg</b> got promoted out of pending.</p>
2037
2038<p><u>New features</u>:
2039Rob rewrote paste, which should work much better now, and added grep
2040-M and -S to match and skip wildcards respectively (useful with -r).
2041Elliott's updated dmesg has -T and --color. The file
2042command can recognize gzip now, uptime grew -s, date grew %N, env knows - as a first argument
2043means -i (posix!) and grew -0, ls defaults to -b
2044instead of -q now when there's a tty, and ls has a new -ll option (with
2045--full-time as a compatibility synonym) showing nanoseconds and (for some
2046reason) timezone. (Why do individual files have timezones?) Elliott added
2047"uudecode -o -" support. Illya Kuzmich taught head -v and -q. The cpio
2048code no longer adds the "TRAILER!!!" entry by default (initramfs extractor
2049doesn't care) without which you can concatenate cpio archives with "cat".
2050(Use the new --trailer option if you want the legacy behavior.)
2051In pending, fdisk compiles now and tar understands bzip2.</p>
2052
2053<p><u>Build</u>:
2054The "make install_airlock" target now symlinks bc from the host because
2055the kernel <a href=https://landley.net/notes-2013.html#28-03-2013>inexplicably</a>
2056needs that to build. This was motivated by
2057<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a>, which builds under
2058a toybox airlock directory.</p>
2059
2060<p>Lots of work on the test suite, mostly from the Android guys who are now
2061running it under Android. This fixed several existing tests that didn't
2062pass, made more tests run on a toybox-only system, and so on. The test suite
2063infrastructure now has a second testing function,
2064"testcmd", which supplies the command name being tested (bypassing
2065shell builtins).</p>
2066
2067<p>Various android build and config fixes, getting closer to being able
2068to let android someday use scripts/make.sh instead of generated/* snapshots.
2069Also more work into building under android's NDK; not quite there yet
2070but much closer.
2071Use nproc in scripts/make.sh detect available processors (so you can control the SMP level with taskset).
2072Removed the old uClibc compatibility glue, it's been 5 years since their
2073<a href=http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2016-December/180102.html>last release</a>.</p>
2074
2075<p>The new config option TOYBOX_PEDANTIC_ARGS checks arguments when there
2076are no arguments, so things like "uptime" no longer silently ignore arguments
2077you pass but instead refuse to run.</p>
2078
2079<p><u>Docs</u>:
2080The FAQ now has more than one entry. Commands no longer output the full
2081help text for argument errors but instead just say "See %s --help" with the
2082command name (in addition to the actual error message).
2083Elliott did a big period-ectomy on all the --help text, and
2084we cleaned up some tab/space inconsistency. The
2085non-html help -a output now has separators with the command name.
2086The top/iotop and pkill/pgrep help text now describe a lot more of what
2087the commands can do. Twitter's code of conduct page went down so we
2088mirrored the text locally.</p>
2089
2090<p><u>Bugfixes</u>:
2091Fixed a race condition in ps/top where a process that exited right as we
2092read its data returned a different error value than we were expecting (which
2093was causing long-running top instances to occasionally exit),
2094mount now gives an error if it can't autodetect the filesystem
2095type, ps no longer queries the terminal size when output isn't to a tty
2096(so "ps -A | cat" doesn't vary), date's chkmktime() was replaced with
2097simple range checks for fields (to avoid false positives from things like
2098timezones and daylight savings time), removed %s from date's help (we
2099didn't implement it, we have @seconds[.nanoseconds] instead), fixed
2100zcat's buffer flush logic (which was always failing on files larger
2101than 32k), and factor now detects requests for numbers >64 bits and fails
2102loudly instead of producing incorrect answers.
2103Elliott fixed touch -a/-m (they were backwards), and allowed ':' in
2104setprop's property names. Grep now exits with 2 for errors (so -q can
2105distinguish "didn't find" from "didn't work"), doesn't stop on symlinks
2106that point nowhere (there was an error_exit() that should just be a warning),
2107and provides error messages for files we could open but not read.</p>
2108
2109<p><u>Library</u>:
2110New library functions: strend() complements strstart(), minof()/maxof()
2111are min/max macros that evalute arguments once and autodetect type (why
2112isn't this in libc?), xmmap() checks MAP_FAILED (which is not NULL).</p>
2113
2114<a name="21-02-2017" /><a href="#21-02-2017"><hr><h2><b>February 21, 2017</b></h2></a>
2115<blockquote><p>Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the
2116Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention
2117away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.</p>
2118<p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
2119
2120<p>Despite everything, <a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.3.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.3</a>
2121(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.3>git commit</a>)
2122is out. The <u>new commands</u> this time are <b>ftpget</b>, <b>ftpput</b>, <b>microcom</b>, and <b>ascii</b>.<p>
2123
2124<p>We also had two command _demotions_ out of defconfig:
2125<b>hostid</b> got moved to toys/example and
2126switched to "default n" because despite <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/gethostid.html>still being in posix</a>
2127the concept of a unique 32 bit number identifying a system is something
2128Linux outgrew about the time Pauline Middelink wrote the first IP
2129Masquerading code. And Elliott did a complete rewrite of <b>dmesg</b> introducing
2130two codepaths that I didn't get a chance to unify and didn't want to
2131hold up the release for, so that's back in pending.</p>
2132
2133<p><u>New features</u>: Rob added units to <b>find</b> -atime and friends
2134(with the legacy -amin alias). Elliott added color and -w to dmesg, fallocate
2135-o, and improved file's ELF parsing. Steve Muckle added -d and finit_module
2136support to modprobe. Rob and Elliott tweaked the
2137ps/top display format a bit more (extending the USER field from 8 to 18 chars
2138and putting + at the end of string fields that got truncated).
2139df -a isn't entirely new, but wasn't documented and needed a bugfix.</p>
2140
2141<p><u>Bugfixes</u>:
2142Last release broke oneit because -c didn't get moved to xopen_stdio() (oops).
2143Rob and Elliott simultaneously spotted ps padding each line to 99999
2144chars when there's no tty (serial console or adb); now it pads to 80 in
2145that case but also switches on -w to avoid field truncation. The "tty"
2146field also sometimes had trailing debris (that's fixed now). And "top" was
2147endlessly redrawing with out tty because receipt of the ANSI size probe
2148results would set SIGWINCH, and handling that sent another ansi probe. (Sigh.)
2149And while we're there, replace "ADDR" with "BIT" in ps -l so there are
2150more than 4 chars left for the "CMD" field on 64 bit systems.</p>
2151
2152<p>Izabera pointed out that split -b and -l can't mix, and suggested seq should
2153multiply to avoid accumulating rounding errors from repeated fractional
2154increments. Wang Xiao Jian fixed a bug in sort -k.
2155Elliott let getprop use the @ character in property names, and
2156Dimitry Ivanov removed the name length limit for system properties.
2157Elliott also improved some error reporting and improved top -H's display
2158of thread names.
2159
2160<p>Josh Gao pointed out that recursive operations on . and .. could be ignored
2161in chmod -R (and the resulting generic fix to dirtree_notdotdot() fixed
2162it in several other places).</p>
2163
2164<p>Justin Cormack caught tar producing a warning to stdout that screwed up
2165"tar c" to stdout.
2166Rob fixed an option parsing bug (where switching off a --longopt in menuconfig
2167confused the parser), and another one where an option excluding itself
2168(ala "abc[-ab][!abc]" with "command -a -b") would segfault.</p>
2169
2170<p>There's some sort of gcc stack over-optimization bug where musl-libc's
2171version of vfork() doesn't get marked with attribute(returns_twice) so
2172stack varabiles in the same function after that get semi-randomly overwritten
2173when the optimizer decides to reclaim the space. So add the attribute
2174to the function the XVFORK() wrapper macro calls. (It's a nommu thing.)</p>
2175
2176<p>Fixed a couple variable size mismatch bugs that were only tested on 64 bit
2177(printf %x 64) or only tested on 32 bit (modprobe), removed some
2178unnecessary casts in stat.</p>
2179
2180<p>Continuing attempts to build under Android NDK brought up that posix
2181defines the global 'stdout' as a macro, which older versions of bionic
2182turned into an array member, but a function was using it as an argument
2183name. (This worked in the AOSP build because it only builds against current
2184bionic, where there's a global 'stdout'.)</p>
2185
2186<p>Several commits argued with clang's warning generation, eventually
2187settling on a variant of __attribute__((__shut_up__)).</p>
2188
2189<p>Android should no longer give spurious error messages
2190when you "ps -A | head" about EPIPE on output. (Older versions of bionic
2191set an error handler on SIGPIPE, but it shouldn't do that now. More recent
2192versions of adb set the SIGPIPE handler to SIGIGN instead of SIGDFL,
2193leading to write returning an error message instead of silently killing
2194the program. So we set it back to the default.)</p>
2195
2196<p><u>Docs</u>:
2197Removed website link to the gmane archive (which didn't survive gmane's
2198change of ownership). The FAQ now answers a _second_ question. (Woo!)
2199Some roadmap updates.</p>
2200
2201<p><u>Build tweaks</u>:
2202Upgraded "make install_airlock" target to only warn about missing
2203commands (unless $PEDANTIC is set) when it sets up the hermetic build
2204path. (The plan is still to implement everything but the toolchain
2205binaries in toybox, but in the meantime we're symlinking other stuff from
2206the $HOST that isn't ready yet. See
2207<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> for an example using
2208this.)</p>
2209
2210<p>Elliott and Rob continue to poke at building toybox with Android's NDK,
2211but it's a work in progress (<a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-December/008767.html>thread</a>). Various changes
2212removing libcutils dependencies and adding an selinux dependency to getprop
2213are fallout from this.</p>
2214
2215<p>Cross-compiling from Macs needs to use "gsed" instead of apple's
2216version, so teach the build to use that name if it exists in the $PATH.
2217If you try to build without running config first, you should get better
2218error reporting now. Added a workaround for Centos' broken "which" command
2219producing output when it _can't_ find a name in the $PATH.</p>
2220
2221<p><u>Library</u>:
2222The new dirtree flag DIRTREE_PROC skips non-numeric entries so things
2223like ps and top can scan /proc more efficiently.</p>
2224
2225<a name="21-10-2016" /><a href="#21-10-2016"><hr><h2><b>October 21, 2016</b></h2></a>
2226<blockquote><p>Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat,
2227we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your
2228own problem.</p><p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
2229
2230<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.2</a>
2231(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.2>git commit</a>)
2232is out.</p>
2233
2234<p>During this development cycle, Elliott Hughes <a href=http://androidbackstage.blogspot.com/2016/07/episode-53-adb-on-adb.html>got interviewed
2235on the ADB podcast</a>
2236and 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>).
2237Both talk about toybox and many other things.
2238The web page also grew a new <a href=faq.html>FAQ page</a>, currently with
2239just the one.</p>
2240
2241<p>New comands added to defconfig are <b>tunctl</b>,
2242<b>log</b>, <b>start</b>, <b>stop</b>, and <b>sendevent</b>.
2243The commands <b>file</b> and <b>netstat</b> got promoted out of pending.
2244Pending added <b>chrt</b>, <b>setfattr</b>, and <b>getfattr</b>, and saw
2245a lot of cleanups to diffstat and dd but not enough to promote them to
2246defconfig yet. A new toys/net directory was added, moving ifconfig, netcat,
2247netstat, rfkill, and tunctl there so far.</p>
2248
2249<p><b>Upgrades</b>: All commands now parse --version when they understand
2250--help, but "true" and "false" should now ignore their arguments entirely.
2251We taught stat to handle "%12x" and "%.12x" printf-style escapes, which
2252apparently other versions do. The ifconfig output now shows the interface's
2253device driver. Added patch -d and --dry-run, wc can now do -cm together,
2254find has a NOP -noleaf so scripts that use that don't break, add -c to md5sum
2255and sha1sum. Elliott taught ps to treat extra aguments as additional -p
2256pids, implemented xxd -s, did a number of upgrades to file (added -HL,
2257support for ar files, improved ELF support to report android API level
2258and stripped/not stripped and it no longer prints a guessed build ID type).
2259Elliott also added optional build-time support for using openssl's
2260assembly-optimized md5sum/sha1sum implementations (leading to a new
2261<a href=design.html>design</a> policy on shared libraries).</p>
2262
2263<p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Too many fixes to "ps" and "touch" to list, from both
2264Elliott and Rob. Rob taught sed to handle s/[[:space:]/]// type sequences
2265properly, switched grep to a better
2266workaround 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,
2267made du max out at 2 terabytes instead of 2 gigabytes on 32-bit systems
2268(it was always designed to, but was missing a typecast),
2269fixed the option parsing infrastructure (config options that remove command
2270line options got the placeholders wrong), fix to printf for printing
2271octal digits and handling the (posix-mandated) difference between %b and
2272non-%b octal output, reading from "-" no longer closes stdin when done,
2273netcat -L works with nommu (although it may need more portability work),
2274and you can now "make test_scankey" if you want to. Several commands
2275(stat, makedeves, chgrp, cp, find) handled user name lookup failure badly
2276(stat was segfaulting if you interrogated a file belonging to a nonexistent
2277user, "chown 12345 file" errored out if you didn't have that user
2278in /etc/passwd... now they should all print/accept the number when
2279appropriate). "LC_ALL=C ls -Cs --color" produces the same output
2280as other versions (two spaces padding, -k hardwired on).<p>
2281
2282<p>Kyungsik Lee fixed a bug
2283in cp (readlink() doesn't actually null terminate the string it reads in),
2284Elliott Hughes made pgrep/pkill return success/failure, fixed trailing
2285whitespace in netstat, fixed a SMACK symbol conflict due to linux/xattr.h
2286changing, fixed ls -sh, and added a lot of
2287stuff to the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap page</a>.
2288Izabera pointed out cmp -l and -s can't be selected at the same time,
2289that timeout was never actually checking -v, that ls should default to -q
2290when output is to a tty, and that "file -" would sometimes try to open "-"
2291instead of stdin.
2292Usischev Yury pointed out a use after free error, and that id shouldn't
2293call exit() directly. Matthias Urhahn pointed out that stat(2) returns
2294hardwired 512-byte units, so stat.c was wrong. David Hedges pointed out
2295that route could only handle 10 character interface names when the kernel
2296can do 15 (it's still in pending for a reason, but fixed). Evgenii
2297Stepanov found and helped diagnose one of the more subtle ps bugs fixed
2298this time around.</p>
2299
2300<p>Calling "make test_blah" no longer causes make to error out if the last
2301test fails (and thus returns a nonzero error code).
2302Building single commands and the multiplexer used to require a "make clean"
2303between them (because they had different config files both of which were older
2304than generated/config.h so it didn't get rebuilt; now it just always
2305rebuilds it).</p>
2306
2307<p>The defconfig build is now slightly less broken on older centos versions
2308(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>
2309
2310<p>Several commands were over-using xprintf(), which flushes its output
2311to check for error (something you only need to do maybe once per line,
2312and even then maybe only in loops because xexit() flushes and checks
2313ferror() for you and adjusts the exit code if we wrote stuff to stdout
2314that couldn't be printed). Lots of little flushes are inefficient,
2315so most things can use normal printf(). (Retransmission
2316of short writes is presumably libc's problem since it's buffering the
2317output and all.)</p>
2318
2319<p><b>Library:</b>
2320New library functions readlink0() and readlinkat0() which properly null
2321terminates the symlink value (which the stock libc function inexplicably
2322doesn't).
2323The new do_lines() function interates reading lines from a filehandle
2324and calling a function on each line.
2325New function pollinate() factoring out netcat's poll() loop so things
2326like telnet can use it.
2327New functions getusername() and getgroupname() return a
2328char * given a uid/gid (and return a string representation of the number
2329if the lookup fails), and xgetpwnamid/xgetgrnamid were renamed to
2330xgetuid/xgetgid and now return an integer instead of a struct (also helping
2331handle lookup failures, you can still return the uid/get for "12345").</p>
2332
2333<p>Switched atolx() to use long long internally.
2334Renamed xopen() to xopen_stdio() and made a new xopen() that never returns
2335stdin, stdout, or stderr (duping /dev/null into the filehandles as necessary).
2336New function xopenro() opens a file read only with one less argument, and
2337understands that "-" means stdin. New flag WARN_ONLY tells these functions
2338to just print a warning on failure, and return -1 instead of exiting.
2339Misc new functions like openro() which defaults to the WARN_ONLY behavior
2340and notstdio() which dup()s a filehandle up beyond stdin/out/err backfilling
2341with /dev/null as necessary. The WARN_ONLY flag let us remove the failok
2342argument from loopfiles().</p>
2343
2344<p>New TOYFLAG_NOHELP disables --help processing (which "true" and "false"
2345should not do).</b>
2346
2347<p>The test suite now has NOSPACE=1 to ignore whitespace (using diff -b to
2348check results), which helps TEST_HOST pass the same tests as toybox.
2349Fixes to chattr and date tests. It also has a new variable $C with the
2350absolute path to the command being tested (bypassing shell builtins),
2351and a function testcmd() which is just like testing() except it prepends
2352the command name ($C) to the test command line as well as the test
2353description.</p>
2354
2355<a name="02-06-2016" /><a href="#02-06-2016"><hr><h2><b>June 2, 2016</b></h2></a>
2356<blockquote><p>When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but
2357highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic
2358analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental
2359signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's
2360brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows
2361quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of
2362liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.</p>
2363<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
2364
2365<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.1</a>
2366(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.1>git commit</a>)
2367is out. (Yes, I forgot to update the --version string, but I already
2368uploaded the <a href=downloads/binaries/0.7.1>binaries</a>.)</p>
2369
2370<p>The website has https support now, you can "make cat ps ls"
2371to get standalone commands (and "make list list_pending" to see what's
2372available), and a whole lot of bugfixes and new options to existing
2373commands.</p>
2374
2375<h2>New Commands</h2>
2376<p>Rob implemented <b>ulimit</b>. In pending, Elliott Hughes implemented
2377file. and Lipi Lee implemented a simple wget. (Pending also had minor
2378cleanups to more and lsof, but no promotions this time around.)</p>
2379
2380<h2>New Options</h2>
2381<p>Izabera implemented env -u, suggested adding seq -w, made factor
2382use full unsigned 64 bit math even on 32 bit platforms, pointed out base64
2383-w0 should disable wrapping, and sped up wc -c.
2384Elliott Hughes added mount -o relatime, xxd -p -r, and od -w.
2385Sameer Pradhan (or possibly Bilal Qureshi) suggested adding stat -tL -c %m%t%T.
2386Tom Cherry added getprop -Z. Paul Barker added hostname -b and -F.
2387Rob added ls -b, made ls -q work with utf8,
2388made sed -f - read from stdin, and added top -O (like ps -O).</p>
2389
2390<p>Elliott and Rob <b>added Thread support to ps and top</b>,
2391with -o TID, TNAME. We also added -o PCY (android scheduling policy),
2392-o BIT (process is 32 or 64 bit), and -o TNAME now shows the parent
2393command name for threads.</p>
2394
2395<h2>Documentation</h2>
2396
2397<p>Rob added the sed invocations to convert tabs/spaces and back to
2398design.html. Isaac Dunham updated hexedit's help text.
2399Jakob Flierl pointed out a broken URL in the README.</p>
2400
2401<p>Rob also redid the naming scheme of sed's pattern manipulation code to
2402remove the gratuitous references to Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series, since it
2403was confusing people.</p>
2404
2405<h2>Bugfixes</h2>
2406
2407<p>Grep -H and -n should now work properly with -ABC. Andy Chu pointed out an
2408out of bounds access for zero length lines in rev, fixed a buffer overflow
2409in diff -r, and fixed operator precedence in expr (although Rob is rewriting
2410chunks of expr so toysh can use its plumbing for $(( )) ).
2411Patrick Ohly fixed the too-aggressive suid permission dropping logic.
2412Josh Gao fixed a segfault when find -iname got no argument, and
2413made tail -f work right with just one file argument.
2414Tom Marshall cleaned up tar's long filename support and improved
2415the tar tests, and reported another find bug (with -iname -o -iname not
2416tracking copy lifetimes properly) that got fixed.</p>
2417
2418<p>Elliott Hughes fixed wc -c to not trust zero length files to actually be
2419zero length (/proc does that), fixed "mount -o rw,remount /system" on
2420Android, removed trailing spaces on ps -o cmdline, fixed pkill -9 and
2421the corresponding tests, made "insmod -" work, fixed top -b and tail -NUM,
2422pointed out that ps shouldn't trim numeric fields for display size limits,
2423and added some more
2424explicit "sort" calls to make pipelines so build tempfiles are easier to cache.
2425Rob <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/32b3587af261>fixed an insane sed thing</a> the perl 5.22 build was doing.
2426Fixed mount -o to properly pass in leftover string data, and
2427<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
2428to fix some bitrot in the kernel NFS driver's string parsing attached
2429to that message).</p>
2430
2431<p>George Burgess IV corrected some variable types in traceroute.
2432Base64 now wraps == properly. Fixed two bzcat segfaults reported by
2433John Regehr. Andy Chu found a segfault in "sed -e 'c\'" with no trailing
2434line, and implemented mv -n and cp -n. The cyanogenmod guys pointed out that
2435cp -a shouldn't complain if a non-root user can't chown, and we added
2436the output path to cp -r error messages while we were there (before was just
2437the filename).</p>
2438
2439<p>Samuel Holland fixed blkid's handling of vfat labels, and
2440fixed a segfault when basename was passed an empty string and an empty
2441suffix. Davis Mosenkovs fixed touch -t seconds parsing.
2442Rob fixed a bunzip bug reported by John Regehr (the bad CRC
2443error message was printing a NUL argument).</p>
2444
2445<p>Not all of the commands build standalone, but more of them do now;
2446scripts/single.sh can now build a "mv" that isn't actually "cp".
2447The dependencies are more granualr, so "make top; make ps" no longer
2448produces a broken ps that ignores -A (because ps.o wasn't getting rebuilt
2449even though top had the FLAG macros for -A zeroed).</p>
2450
2451<h2>Build</h2>
2452<p>Rob added a <b>warning when building commands out of
2453pending</b>. (The pending directory is full of code that hasn't been
2454properly vetted. Use at your own risk.)</p>
2455
2456<p><b>New build targets let you build individual commands by name</b>, ala
2457"make ls cat ps", and you can run the test suite for each standalone
2458command with "make test_ls" and such.
2459"make list" shows all such standalone commands in defconfig, and
2460"make list_pending" shows unfinished commands from toys/pending
2461("make list list_pending" shows both together). "make clean" now deletes
2462these filenames at the top level, and the corresponding unstripped files
2463live in the directory generated/unstripped.</p>
2464
2465<p>Nicholas Boichat suggested switching make.sh to use $! for process
2466enumeration during parallel builds (which is both more efficient and more
2467portable), and suggested shell builtin replacements for wc/awk/sed so the
2468build loop has fewer forks now.</p>
2469
2470<p>Lots of work on the test suite, much of it due to Andy Chu. It now
2471consistently prints the name of the command being tested at the start of each
2472test (and the common infrastructure does that, not each individual test), and
2473"make tests" actually runs all the available tests now.
2474Seperated pgrep and pkill tests, split lsattr/chattr, added fstype and base64
2475tests. The "tests/files" directory now collects files for tests to
2476use, with blkid, bzcat, and utf8 subdirectories: the $FILES variable
2477gives a path to it, so "$FILES/blkid/ext2.bz2" and so on.
2478The testsuite now has test files with 3 different types of "not utf8 output"
2479sequences that require escaping, plus some combining character torture
2480tests, direction reversals, and so on.</p>
2481
2482<p>Added dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK to various pending commands that need
2483nommu conversion (which should fix the allyesconfig build).</p>
2484
2485<p>Static builds with selinux should work again.</p>
2486
2487<h2>Library</h2>
2488
2489<p>New bufgetgrgid() and bufgetpwuid() functions cache previous lookup info
2490rather than repeatedly traversing /etc/passwd and /etc/group (which is slow).
2491Added xpipe() to lib to catch pipe creation failure.
2492The HELP_ macros generated by config2help.c now use a capital prefix
2493to avoid collicing with help_exit() and such.</p>
2494
2495<p>The dirtree infrastructure got a cleanup pass in preparation for adding
2496infinite recursion depth support (needed by rm -r), updated the
2497<a href=code.html#ib_dirtree>documentation</a> to describe the new
2498semantics (removing dirtree_start() and adding dirtree_flagread()).
2499Now dirtree_recurse() takes the new dirfd as an argument.</p>
2500
2501<p>Split out _xexit() from xexit() and let sigatexit() set multiple
2502callbacks.</p>
2503
2504<p>For years the man pages have said to #include <sys/types.h> to get
2505major/minor/makedev but now that glibc
2506<a href=https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-11/msg00253.html>has vowed
2507to break existing programs</a> and replace it with another nonstandard header
2508not in posix or lsb, we added our own functions to lib/ to do the transform
2509ourselves (based on what the kernel actually expects).</p>
2510
2511<h2>Portability</h2>
2512
2513<p>Debian unstable started needing an extra header #include for some reason, and
2514although printf("%.*s", INT_MAX, s) worked fine on Ubuntu 12.04 it
2515didn't on 14.04, so added a workaround for that. Typecast a printf because
2516wchar_t isn't a rigidly defined size. RLIMIT_RTTIME was
2517added to the kernel in 2008 but you can't expect uClibc to have noticed yet,
2518nor did it #define MS_RELATIME (added in 2006), or prlimit (2010)...
2519(Given the improvements in musl and bionic, uClibc support may be dropped
2520in a future release.) Given that the xattr functions were added during
2521linux 2.5, we can #include its header unconditionally.</p>
2522
2523<p>Renamed basename_r() to something else to avoid conflicting with freebsd's
2524libc, and both scripts/install.h and scripts/config2help.c no longer include
2525toys.h (to make cross-compiling from systems we don't run on easier).</p>
2526
2527<p>Debian bug 635570 did something unspeakably nonportable, depending on
2528"sed -e 'a\'" (with no next line of the pattern, so an unterminated
2529continuation) to add a newline to the last line of input if and only if
2530that last line of the input didn't have a newline, and to take no other
2531action. This is well into "depending on a bug" territory, but we implemented
2532it because otherwise Debian's install broke. (Of course this behavior
2533is undocumented, non-obvious, and doesn't really make logical sense.)</p>
2534
2535<p>CONFIG_TOYBOX_NORECURSE now disables the stack measuring logic (which
2536was giving some "security" code fits). Also we typecast pointers to (long)
2537before comparing them to avoid spurious compiler "optimizations" that
2538break the code.</p>
2539
2540<a name="02-02-2016" /><a href="#02-02-2016"><hr><h2><b>February 2, 2016</b></h2></a>
2541<blockquote><p>"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that
2542quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with
2543you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
2544</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
2545
2546<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.0</a>
2547(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.0>git commit</a>)
2548is out.</p>
2549
2550<p>The new commands in defconfig are <b>iotop</b>, <b>top</b>, <b>pgrep</b>,
2551and <b>pkill</b>
2552(most replacing corresponding versions from pending). Added grep -ABC,
2553swapon -d (discard), mkswap -L (label) and UUID support, and find -delete.
2554Izabera added free -h and unshare -f. Josh Gao implemented tail -f.
2555Jose Bollo submitted cp --preserve=context,attr. Kylie McClain added
2556mktemp -u.</p>
2557
2558<p>In pending there's the start of a vi command, and Sameer Pradhan contributed
2559a new dhcp6. This cycle saw several rounds of route cleanup and a little dhcp
2560cleanup, but neither are complete yet. Lipi Lee did some cleanup to netstat.c
2561and Elliott Hughes removed warnings from traceroute.</p>
2562
2563<p>Lots of updates to ps: several new -o options, -k (--sort) -O and -M,
2564improved compatibility with Android's historical behavior, and
2565extensive internal code cleanup (including the removal of all
2566the magic constants).</p>
2567
2568<h3><b>Website</b></h3>
2569
2570<p>Dreamhost restored the <a href="#12-21-2015">missing 11 months</a>
2571to the mailing list archive, in the process deleting the month after
2572that. Now they've asked if I have mbox files archiving the new
2573gap (between December 20, 2015 to January 21, 2016, and presumably they
2574could also fill in the gap from December 14, 2014 to January 3, 2015 that's
2575been there since the last time they did this),
2576but due to some gmail filtering I've
2577<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2012.html#15-10-2012>never
2578been able to disable</a>, my copy of those files is spread among 3 different
2579mbox files I'd have to sort/filter/collate. (It's on the todo list.)</p>
2580
2581<p>Added a code of conduct to the README (we're
2582<a href=https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/code-of-conduct>borrowing twitter's</a>) because somebody
2583made it necessary.</p>
2584
2585<h3><b>Bugfixes</b></h3>
2586<p>Fixed another sed bug where any ] right after [ was skipped (not just the
2587first one in the range, so [[] didn't terminate). Fixed sort -f and added test cases.
2588Assume 80 columns in "ls -m | cat", ls -L is no longer backwards,
2589and ls of files with no paths no longer uses an uninitialized (zero) dirfd.
2590Several bugfixes
2591to find (Gilad Arnold fixed -perm, Daniel K. Levy fixed "find . -exec echo {}",
2592and while we're there I fixed find --prune, made "find . -execdir
2593echo {} + -execdir ls {} +" work, and ripped out the environment size
2594measuring code that checked for a 128k limit removed back in linux 2.6.22).
2595Elliott Hughes fixed the date command's parsing of 4 digit
2596years and documented the %s escape, fixed hwclock -u, and pointed out
2597that runcon needs to exec to do its job (not recursively call another
2598command_main() in the same process). Tom Marshall reported that blkid was
2599handling ext2 wrong. Mike Moreton corrected cpio extraction's uid and gid
2600values, and added a --no-preserve-owner option. Fixed the SUID permission
2601dropping logic (which was a bit over-zealous, preventing some commands from
2602running at all).</p>
2603
2604<p>I'm told that debian-testing broke its libc so the nsenter build breaks,
2605but my attempts to install the debian-testing network cd image under
2606qemu keep breaking. Maybe someday they'll fix it enough I can actually
2607reproduce the problem. (Debootstrap under unbuntu builds an ubuntu-flavored
2608chroot in which toybox builds fine.)</p>
2609
2610<h3><b>Documentation</b></h3>
2611<p>Rewrite of the about.html page, tweaks to design.html, and a re-triage of
2612sbase in roadmap.html. Update to mkstatus.py to collate multiple span
2613tags with the same id, resulting in a larger status.html page (which
2614was previously ignoring some commands in the roadmap).</p>
2615
2616<p>Expanded the defconfig/allyesconfig/allnoconfighelp text in "make help"
2617to explain what they're for.</p>
2618
2619<h3><b>infrastructure</b></h3>
2620<ul>
2621<li><p>Expanded toys.optargs to 64 bits so a command can have more than 32 options.</p></li>
2622<li><p>Added NOEXIT() wrapper to turn xwrap() functions into warning versions
2623using the existing longjump(toys.rebound) infrastructure.</p></li>
2624<li><p>Renamed dirtree->data to dirfd and stopped storing symlink length
2625into it (this fixed a bug where following symlinks to directories
2626didn't give a valid directory filehandle, noticeable with ls -Z).</p></li>
2627<li><p>New TAGGED_ARRAY() infrastructure generates index and bitmask macros
2628for arrays of structures starting with a name string.</p></li>
2629<li><p>New lib/linestack.c for utf8 fontmetrics (draw_str() and utf8len()
2630and so on), and for tracking multiple lines of text
2631(vi, less, shell history) that need wordwrapping and scrolling up/down.</p></li>
2632<li><p>Upgrades to lib/interestingtimes.c: scan_key() now has a timeout
2633in milliseconds and recognizes more sequences including ANSI
2634window size probes. New utf8 test files in tests/files/utf8 including
2635sequence reversing, stacked combining chars, and all three types of
2636unprintable sequences (low ascii <32 ala ^X, invalid utf8 sequences ala
2637<AB><CD>, and invalid unicode code points ala U+1234).</p></li>
2638<li><p>More comma handling code in lib.c: comma_args()</p></li>
2639<li><p>Added error_msg_raw() to shut up fortify's endless static checking false
2640positives.</p></li>
2641<li><p>readfileat() can now realloc() in a loop to read long files
2642("zcat | insmod" needed it).</p></li>
2643</ul>
2644
2645<h3><b>Roadmap</b></h3>
2646<p>We're getting close to having a self-hosting development environment
2647using toybox for the command line. The remaining busybox commands in
2648<a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>Aboriginal Linux</a> are:</p>
2649
2650<blockquote><p><b>
2651awk bunzip2 bzcat bzip2 dd diff expr fdisk ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip gzip
2652less ping route sh sha512sum tar test tr unxz vi wget xzcat zcat
2653</b></p></blockquote>
2654
2655<p>And the remaining non-busybox commands in Aboriginal Linux's build/host
2656directory (from the distcc, genext2fs, e2fsprogs, zlib, and squashfs packagesi)
2657are:</p>
2658
2659<blockquote><p><b>
2660mke2fs fsck.ext2 resize2fs distcc genext2fs unsquashfs distccd mksquashfs tune2fs
2661</b></p></blockquote>
2662
2663<p>Squashfs and distcc are probably out of scope for toybox, but mke2fs,
2664fsck.ext2, resize2fs, genext2fs, and tune2fs should all be added to the
2665above "busybox" replacement list.</p>
2666
2667<p>Remind me to include this countdown in future releases. Once they've all
2668been replaced, the next goal is <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>building AOSP under itself</a>.</p>
2669
2670<p>See the full <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> and <a href=status.html>status</a>
2671pages for more details.</p>
2672
2673<a name="12-21-2015" /><a href="#12-21-2015"><hr><h2><b>December 21, 2015</b></h2></a>
2674
2675<p>Yes, 11 months have gone missing from the mailing list web archive.</p>
2676
2677<p>Yesterday evening Dreamhost's mailman server went down (timing out trying
2678to connect). I poked them about it, they
2679<a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/678781271670149121>blamed
2680DNS</a>, I explained that the hang was _after_ the DNS lookup and
2681entered the dig info into the trouble ticket showing the IPs the DNS
2682queries were returning, they reinstalled the server at that IP from what I
2683assume was their most recent backup, and that's how 11 months of messages
2684vanished out of the archive.</p>
2685
2686<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
2687can do. <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>Last time</a>
2688this sort of thing <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>happened</a>
2689we went back and forth for months, so I added a link to a backup web
2690archive (in the nav bar on the left) that isn't controlled by dreamhost,
2691and thus doesn't gratuitously lose data on a regular basis. (I note
2692the earlier hole in Dreamhost's archive was never fixed either. That
2693was data never getting archived, this is a year's worth of data that
2694was in the archive until yesterday vanishing after the fact.)</p>
2695
2696<p>If you're wondering why the <a href=http://lists.landley.net>top level</a>
2697list page has been "temporarily disabled" for multiple years now... you'd have
2698to ask Dreamhost. I know I have. More than a dozen times.</p>
2699
2700<a name="03-11-2015" /><a href="#03-11-2015"><hr><h2><b>November 3, 2015</b></h2></a>
2701<blockquote><p>"Alright," said Ford. "How would you react if I said that I'm
2702not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity
2703of Betelgeuse?" Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way. "I don't know," he
2704said, taking a pull of beer. "Why - do you think it's the sort of thing you're
2705likely to say?"</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
2706
2707<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.1</a>
2708(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.1>git commit</a>)
2709is out.</p>
2710
2711<p>We have a new <b>ps</b> command with all the -o fields posix wants (although
2712it doesn't accept BSD non-dash option syntax yet), and <b>bunzip2</b> (not just
2713bzcat but the proper extract-in-place command).
2714Sameer Pradhan added <b>hostid</b> and <b>fsync</b>.
2715Elliott Hughes added <b>flock</b>.
2716
2717<p>The people waiting for <b>human readable number support</b> (du -hH, ls -h,
2718and so on) can thank Elliott Hughes for implementing it. (Our output doesn't
2719exactly match others' because we our "binary" mode will say 1.0G instead of
27201024M, which is a bug in the other one we didn't emulate.)</p>
2721
2722<p>The other big news is <b>nommu support</b>, tested on the new
2723<a href=http://nommu.org/jcore>jcore</a> processor but presumaby working
2724on any nommu system. A few commands don't support nommu yet, but those
2725are disabled by dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK in menuconfig when building
2726for nommu. The roadmap now has a large section analyzing the uClinux
2727project (note that <a href=http://nommu.org>nommu.org</a> is slowly replacing
2728<a href=http://uclinux.org>uclinux.org</a> as the standard repository of
2729all knowledge and wisdom about nommu. The old site <a href=#12-02-2012>contains
2730much that is apocryphal</a>, or at least wildly inaccurate, and the new one
2731is trying to improve on that).</p>
2732
2733<p>Both "make change" and scripts/single.sh (for building standalone commands
2734without the multiplexer logic) now use the top level .config
2735for toybox global settings such as Linux Security Blanket Module selection,
2736(so make defconfig before change now).</p>
2737
2738<p>Documentation updates to the <a href=code.html>code</a> and
2739<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> pages.</p>
2740
2741<h3>pending</h3>
2742
2743<p>In the pending directory Sameer Pradhan added tftp,
2744and Elliott Hughes sent lsof. Isaac Dunham upgraded mdev,
2745reboot, init, login, and modprobe, and fixed a distro-specific build break in
2746scripts/mkflags.h. Elliott Hughes and Lipi Lee made netstat -p handle
2747command lines longer than 21 characters, and Elliott fixed netstat -e and
2748some build warnings. Yeongdeok Suh fixed a warning in dhcpd.
2749I started cleanup on pgrep/pkill.</p>
2750
2751<h3>Command updates, bugfixes, and infrastructure</h3>
2752
2753<p>The multiplexer's "command not found" error exit is now 127, so now you can't
2754distinguish between a command not being found in the multiplexer and
2755the multiplexer itself not being found by the shell, because people wanted
2756that for some reason.</p>
2757
2758<p>Elliott Hughes made date reject invalid dates rather
2759than set the clock to something weird (setting the clock 100 years into the
2760future makes most Linux desktops surprisingly unhappy, and ntpdate won't fix it
2761either), fixed several ls -l display issues (user/group field ordering,
2762make user/group/lsmcontext left aligned), did the aforementioned
2763extensive work on human readable number output, fixed ionice's default
2764class, fixed a mv overwrite bug, made df's columns auto-size, added
2765--ppid and -Z to ps, and teamed up with Daniel K. Levy to fix
2766a segfault in find's handling of -newer -group or -user.</p>
2767
2768<p>Hyejin Kim added stat -c %T support. Colin Cross worked
2769on vmstat fixing
2770a header printing bug and calculating the bi and bo columns in the right
2771units. Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra
2772newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed.
2773Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain
2774pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax.
2775Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows
2776all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p>
2777
2778<p>Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra
2779newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed.
2780Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain
2781pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax.
2782Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows
2783all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p>
2784
2785<p>Two large thinko fixes in oneit: -3 was always enabled (which would
2786eventually block if the child never read the exiting PID numbers from its file
2787descriptor #3 until the pipe filled up), and the signal handlers weren't
2788set up right (for requesting semi-graceful halt/poweroff/reboot).
2789Calling install without a mode is now 0755, and install -g 0 no longer clashes
2790with cp --preserve. Better error message for ls -r on unreadable
2791directories, and ls -Z now uses O_PATH (with the /proc/self/fd/%d
2792workaround for kernel stupidity as necessary).</p>
2793
2794<p>Date now understands @unixtime[.fraction] and uses -D for
2795the set-side format (matching busybox's extension for this). The seq -f
2796string now checks that it's got exactly one %f escape with the correct
2797attributes (and a whole bunch of test cases for it). Fixed a bug
2798in od that screwed up the position indicator on arm and mips.
2799In stat the d/h units moved from %d %D to the default string.
2800And patch can now correctly apply hunks with trailing context to the start of
2801the file.</p>
2802
2803<p>The prompt argument moved out of yesno() (the caller can print the prompt
2804themselves). Replaced toys.exithelp with help_exit(). Added new
2805XVFORK() macro, and xpopen_both() calls /proc/self/exe when passed
2806a NULL argv (see cpio -p for example usage). Replaced toys.recurse
2807with toys.stacktop so the recurse or re-exec decision is now based
2808on bytes of stack space used. Marked a bunch of command-local functions
2809static.</p>
2810
2811<p>New additions to lib/ include strlower(), xconnect(), and the
2812aforementioned help_exit().
2813The testsuite now has some infrastructure tests based on "example"
2814commands such as toys/examples/test_human_readable.c.
2815The login command finally got a long-overdue cleanup (it's one of the
2816commands that predate the "pending" directory but were part of the reason
2817for it). Hexedit had an
2818uninitialized variable (of course gcc didn't spot it, it was too busy
2819warning about "may be used uninitialized but never actually is" variables).</p>
2820
2821<p>Tweaked makefile so
2822"make CROSS_COMPILE=prefix-" (as well as "CROSS_COMPILE=prefix- make",
2823which still works). Toybox is now installed chmod -w so broken installers
2824(like the bunzip2 package's) that try to overwrite existing binaries won't
2825knock out the whole of toybox.
2826GCC 5.2.0 stopped being able to compile Linux 2.6.12's kconfig, but
2827we added a workaround. You can now build uptime without utmpx.h.
2828Alejandro Joya pointed out that enabling smack required smack on the host
2829as well as target when cross compiling, which is now fixed.</p>
2830
2831<p>Note: toybox can autodetect nommu support when building with a uClibc
2832toolchain 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>,
2833but <a href=http://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>with musl-libc</a>
2834you'll have to enable CONFIG_TOYBOX_MUSL_NOMMU_IS_BROKEN to work around the
2835fact they provide a non-functional fork() implementation that always returns
2836-ENOSYS, to prevent you from compile-time probing for nommu support when
2837cross-compiling. Unfortunately "preventing you from probing" seems to be
2838an explicit policy with musl, they also don't provide an "#ifdef __MUSL__"
2839because their library is perfect and you're only ever allowed to work around
2840other people's bugs, not theirs. So we have to use menuconfig to manually
2841enable musl-specific bug workarounds.</p>
2842
2843<a name="23-07-2015" /><a href="#23-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2015</b></h2></a>
2844<p>I recreated the <a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>0.6.0 source tarball</a>
2845(new sha1sum 08fb1c23f520c25a15f262a8a95ea5b676a98d54)
2846because I forgot to add --prefix to the git archive command when I updated
2847my release script from mercurial, so the files weren't in an enclosing
2848directory. (Ooops.)</p>
2849
2850<a name="19-07-2015" /><a href="#19-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 19, 2015</b></h2></a>
2851<blockquote><p>
2852The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic
2853component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar
2854hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it
2855around in.</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
2856
2857<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.0</a>
2858(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.0>git commit</a>)
2859is out. (Yes, git. See the <a href=#05-04-2015>previous news entry</a>.)</p>
2860
2861<p>Sorry for the unusually long gap between releases. Since last release Ye
2862Olde Project Maintainer traveled to japan twice and had two more "once
2863a century" floods at home. (Probably a coincidence.) Still catching up.</p>
2864
2865<h3><b>CELF/ELC talk and Wikipedia[citation needed] article</b></h3>
2866
2867<p>I gave another State Of The Toybox talk
2868(<a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04XwAbtPmAg>video</a>
2869<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2015.txt>outline</a>), in which I
2870repeat my <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#07-11-2013>perennial</a>
2871<a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/557309224535851009>complaint</a>
2872that Wikipedia[citation needed]
2873<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox>still</a>
2874<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#Controversy_over_Toybox>says</a>
2875toybox was relicensed before its hiatus, when relicensing was why
2876the hiatus ended.</p>
2877
2878<p>Since Wikipedia[citation needed] seems unable to do the
2879<a href=#15-11-2011>most</a>
2880<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/log/tip/LICENSE>basic</a>
2881<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011>research</a> on
2882this point, and has stuck to an incorrect sequence of events for years,
2883I've been gradually escalating my attempts to correct them. Toybox
2884came out of mothballs in November 2011 <b>because</b> it could be
2885relicensed. That's what opened up a new niche busybox wasn't already
2886filling with a 10 year headstart.</p>
2887
2888<a name="asterisk_back" />
2889<p>The article has plenty of smaller issues<a href=#asterisk>*</a>, but
2890given that I gave an entire talk at Ohio LinuxFest in 2013
2891(<a href=http://landley.net/talks/ohio-2013.txt>outline</a>,
2892<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
2893my projects, that one bugs me.</p>
2894
2895<h3><b>New stuff this release</b></h3>
2896
2897<p>There's a new android menu in menuconfig, and rather a lot of Linux
2898Security Module support (Smack for Tizen from Xavier Roche and José Bollo,
2899and SELinux for Android from Elliott Hughes; see
2900the Security Blanket menu under global settings in menuconfig) has
2901trickled in, although there's still more to come.</p>
2902
2903<p><b>New commands:</b> Added reset, nproc, ionice, and iorenice.
2904Elliott Hughes contributed xxd, runcon,
2905restorecon, load_policy, getenforce, setenforce, getprop, and setprop.
2906Promoted shred, nsenter, and hwclock.</p>
2907
2908<p>You can once again build catv now the flag infrastructure's been updated to
2909let it coexist with cat -v.
2910And on a long plane flight I wrote
2911hexedit, an interactive hex editor that implements the start of
2912cursor control infrastructure (for eventual use by less and vi and shell
2913command history and so on).</p>
2914
2915<p><b>New options:</b> Added sed -E as a BSD-compatible synonym for -r.
2916Upgraded oneit with -r (restart), -3 (send exiting PID values to child),
2917and signal handling. Added -v option to timeout, -m to mknod, -u to shred,
2918-t to dmesg, and -123 to head and tail. Added implicit "." to grep -r without
2919any files to work on. Hyejin Kim requested prefix support for truncate -s.
2920Greg Hackman added -inum to find.
2921Jan Cybulski added the smack side of ls -Z support. Various patches also
2922added -Z to mkdir, mknod, and mkfifo.
2923Basic cp --preserve support went in, but not yet the xattr/LSM parts.</p>
2924
2925<p>The toybox command now has a --version option,
2926which uses "git describe" if available.</p>
2927
2928<p><b>Build infrastructure:</b>
2929The "make change" target now saves the output of each failed standalone
2930command build in a .bad file, and "make defconfig" is quieter now.</p>
2931
2932<p>Paul Barker submitted a large patch changing command install paths so
2933"toybox can be installed alongside busybox without confusing
2934update-alternatives". (There's some argument over
2935what the right paths should be, and I'm waiting for
2936people to tell me what else needs fixing because I have no idea. I've
2937been symlinking /bin to /usr/bin since 2002
2938<a href=http://landley.net/writing/hackermonthly-issue022-pg33.pdf>for
2939historical reasons</a>.)</p>
2940
2941<p><b>Docs:</b> The repository link now goes to github, with another link
2942to the commit rss feed.</p>
2943
2944<p>Elliott Hughes updated the Android section of the roadmap
2945(and he would know). Redid bits of scripts/mkstatus.py to make updating
2946status.html easier, and the README is larger.</p>
2947
2948<p>More description of option parsing in code.html, which now describes the
2949FLAG_x macros, switching flag macro sets with FOR_newcommand, how
2950configuration zeroes flag macros and using FORCE_FLAGS to suppress the
2951zeroing of options shared between commands. Also added description of ";"
2952to make --longopts take an optional =value part, and more about TOYBOX_DEBUG
2953to check NEWTOY() option strings (otherwise a bad option string makes
2954lib/args.c obviously segfault, but doesn't explain why).</p>
2955
2956<p>Added a "Why 0BSD?" section to license.html when submitting zero clause bsd
2957to SPDX (according to the pending license spreadsheet, it's been approved for
2958SPDX 2.2).</p>
2959
2960<p>The old list of commands needing cleanup but not in pending was
2961removed from toys/pending/README and instead the issues were added
2962as TODO comments in the individual commands.</p>
2963
2964<p><b>Bugfixes:</b>
2965Fixed mount -a segfaulting without -O (reported by Janus Troelsen),
2966and made it try a "become rw" ioctl() on the block device before falling
2967back to mounting read only (because Android expects that).
2968Fixed printf -- and printf ---. Lots of tweaks to ls -l spacing with
2969different options. Make touch -d and -t actually set time when you don't
2970specify nanoseconds.
2971Fixed a subtle bug where recursive calls (toybox commands that run other
2972toybox commands) weren't resetting all their state. (This manifested as
2973a "no }" error from "find | xargs sed", but could cause other problems.)
2974And David Halls reported another sed bug trying to compile libiconv (which
2975left extra \ at the start of lines in a generated shell script, breaking
2976the build). Output an error message for "cat /mnt".</p>
2977
2978<p>Kylie McClain reported that mktemp broke when $TMPDIR was set to an empty
2979string (which is not the same as unset), that install/find didn't support
2980numeric uid/gids, and that sort -z affects both input and output.
2981Isabella Parakiss fixed a printf.c bug.
2982David Halls fixed bugs in install -D and find -exec. Samuel Holland
2983fixed unshare -r. Hyejin Kim fixed makedevs with a count of 1, fold -w
2984range checking, an error path in scripts/mkflags.c, added -i to dhcpd,
2985and stopped su from prompting the root user for the new user's password.
2986Jan Cybulski spotted wrong indentation when combining ls -s and -i with -C and
2987-x. José Bollo fixed stat %G. Sameer Pradhan fixed a bug in mkfifo -Z.</p>
2988
2989<p>Elliott Hughes asked for a default SIGPIPE handler to disable
2990the signal handler bionic's dynamic loader installs (yes really). Still not
2991100% sure what the correct behavior is there. (Posix is
2992(<a href=http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.standards.posix.austin.general/10915>actively unhelpful</a>, but at least they're taking
2993<a href=http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=789#c1976>years to
2994make up their mind</a>. Elliott also sent patches to fix a typo in
2995useradd.test, add missing arguments to error_exit() calls and clean up
2996printf() format strings, fix an off by one error in human_readable(),
2997fix dmesg -c error reporting, fix a segfault in comma_scan where the option
2998was the last item in optlist (triggered by mount -o ro,remount), fix
2999hwclock -w, made ifconfig print lowercase MAC addresses (it was bothering
3000him), and make terminal_size() read the right environment variable
3001(LINES, not ROWS). And he suggested the test suite notice high command exit
3002values (corresponding to segfault or other signals).</p>
3003
3004<p>People are apparently using toys/pending commands, despite the police tape
3005and flashing lights, so added louder warnings to toys/pending/README.
3006Elliott Hughes fixed various problems with tar, dd, more, and top.
3007Hyejin Kim cleaned up syslogd and dumpleases. Isaac Dunham added hotplug
3008support to mdev. Yeongdeok Suh added RFC-3315 ipv6 support to dhcpd.</p>
3009
3010<p>I rewrote ps.c from scratch (in pending), but it's not ready for real use
3011yet.</p>
3012
3013<p><b>Portability:</b>
3014On the portability front Bernhard Rosenkranzer fixed a problem where the
3015menuconfig code wouldn't compile in C99 mode. (This led to me documenting
3016the craptacular nature of kconfig in a README, and the plan to replace it
3017sometime before 1.0.) Some extra flags to shut up overzealous llvm warnings
3018were added (and have to be probed for because gcc complains about
3019arguments it doesn't recognize even when they switch stuff _off_ using
3020a standard syntax). Don't depend on malloc(0) to return non-null in ls.
3021David Halls fixed some mac/ios portability issues,
3022implying somebody's built at least part of toybox on a mac.</p>
3023
3024<p>Added basename_r() to lib/lib.c because the posix semantics for basename()
3025are stupid but what the gnu guys did to it was appalling.
3026Turns out bionic already had a basename_r(), but posix still doesn't.
3027Fixed it up in portability.h, but this
3028could break more stuff in future. (Correct fix is to lobby posix to add it,
3029which would probably take about 15 years...)</p>
3030
3031<p><b>Infrastructure:</b>
3032The build now checks $LDFLAGS for linker-only flags, and allows the strip
3033command to fail (binflt toolchains provide a strip that doesn't work).
3034Since time.c uses floating point, added TOYBOX_FLOAT dependency in config.</p>
3035
3036<p>There's a lib/lsm.h defining varous inline functions for linux
3037security modules stuff, if (lsm_enabled()) should turn into a compile-time
3038constant 0 and let code drop out when TOYBOX_LSM_NONE selected, but
3039testing against CFG_TOYBOX_LSM_NONE or derived symbols is still useful
3040becuase when it _is_ enabled the probe turns into a system call you
3041don't want to repeat too much.</p>
3042
3043<p>Switched a bunch of commands from signal() to xsignal(). Factored out
3044xgetgrnamid() and xgetpwnamid() into xwrap.c. Make time.c depend on
3045TOYBOX_FLOAT (since it always uses float so shouldn't be available on
3046build targets without even software float). Added readfileat() to lib/lib.c.</p>
3047
3048<p>The dirtree infrastructure now passes in full flags for the old symlink
3049field, and the new DIRTREE_SHUTUP flag disables warnings if a file vanishes
3050out from under you during traverse. New dirtree_start() wrapper to
3051create dirtree root with only two arguments.</p>
3052
3053<p>The not-curses infrastructure introduced by hexedit mostly moved to
3054lib/interestingtimes.c.</p>
3055
3056<a name="asterisk" />
3057<a href="#asterisk_back" />Asterisk:</a> such when
3058Tim contacted me (my blog says a couple days before nov 13, 2011, I.E.
305911/11/11 not some specific day 2 months later) to ask if I wanted to work
3060on a new project he was proposing called
3061<a href=http://www.elinux.org/Busybox_replacement_project>BentoBox</a>
3062(because I used to do busybox, he'd forgotten toybox existed
3063until I brought it up). And don't ask me what "focuses not on compatibility
3064with its GNU counterparts" means when CP_MORE adds 7 non-posix options
3065and toys/other has 84 commands in neither posix nor LSB. I think they're
3066struggling to explain the difference having dismissed "licensing" as being
3067the reason it started up again after a long hiatus? The reason I don't think
3068GNU is special is there are a half-dozen other independent
3069implementations of the same unix command tools out there (AT&amp;T,
3070BSD, Coherent, Minix, plan 9, busybox, toybox, and several more analyzed in
3071the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a>, and that's ignoring the implementations
3072written for DOS or in assembly over the years). But I do care what
3073Linux From Scratch expects, and if it's
3074<a href=http://archive.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-museum/7.6/LFS-BOOK-7.6-NOCHUNKS.html#ch-tools-gcc-pass1>calling mv -v</a>
3075then I impelement mv -v
3076even if <a href=http://landley.net/toybox/roadmap.html>posix hasn't got
3077it</a>. And I don't know why "gnu counterparts" would describe this when
3078util-linux isn't a gnu package, nor are info-zip, e2fsprogs, kmod, less,
3079procps, shadow, sysklogd, vim, zlib, sudo, dhcpcd...</p>
3080
3081<a name="05-04-2015" /><a href="#05-04-2015"><hr><h2><b>April 5, 2015</b></h2></a>
3082<p>Since <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox/>android</a> and
3083<a href=https://git.tizen.org/cgit/platform/upstream/toybox.git>tizen</a>
3084and <a href=https://github.com/kraj/meta-musl/tree/master/recipes-core/toybox>openembedded</a>
3085and <a href=https://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/toybox>gentoo</a>
3086and so on have all been using Georgi Chorbadzhiyski's git mirror rather
3087than the mercurial repository, I bit the bullet and switched the project's repo
3088<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox>to git</a>. Georgi's
3089<a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>mirror</a> is now pulling from that.</p>
3090
3091<a name="25-02-2015" /><a href="#25-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 25, 2015</b></h2></a>
3092<blockquote><p>"A common mistake that people make when trying to design
3093something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of
3094complete fools."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
3095
3096<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.5.2</a>
3097(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1702>commit 1702</a>) is out.</p>
3098
3099<p>New promoted commands: sed (finally fixed enough it builds Linux From
3100Scratch), printf (cleaned up and promoted), shred and
3101base64 (the Tizen guys wanted them), getenforce, setenforce, and chcon (android),
3102mix (promoted with fixes from Isaac Dunham), nsenter (from
3103Andy Lutomirski, merged into unshare).</p>
3104
3105<p>Elliott Hughes submited a bunch of patches to support Android (to
3106both toybox and Bionic libc, which he maintains). On toybox's end this
3107involved a lot of fixups to portability.[ch] and fixes to over a dozen
3108commands, plus several new ones. Other portability fixes included working
3109with buildroot's uclibc fork and building for nommu targets.</p>
3110
3111<p>The new "make change" target builds each toybox command as a standalone
3112binary. Rather a lot of commands that didn't build by themselves (mv depending
3113on cp and so on) were hit with a large rock until they built standalone.
3114This involved rewriting bits of option parsing, more elaborate dependency
3115generation, making each command have its own config
3116symbol and main() function (even when it's just a wrapper calling another
3117command's main()), and so on. Also, some commands can't be built standalone
3118at a conceptual level: "help" describes other enabled commands and "sh"
3119has a number of bulitin commands (cd, exit, set) that require the
3120multiplexer infrastructure, so "make change" filters them out.</p>
3121
3122<p>The mailing list's web archive is still screwed up. Dreamhost has
3123been trying to fix it since approximately September. There are
3124<a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>two</a>
3125<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>other</a> less broken
3126archives, but neither has quite the same UI as mailman.</p>
3127
3128<h3>Bugfixes and tweaks</h3>
3129
3130<p>Cynt Rynt sent in tests for ifconfig,
3131Robert Thompson taught factor to accept whitespace separated arguments,
3132Hyejin Kim pointed out that some of mktemp's longopts were attached to
3133the wrong short options,
3134Luis Felipe Strano Moraes fixed a wrong free() call in bootchartd in pending.
3135Patches from Ashwini Sharma to make "df /dev/node" work, prevent du from
3136looping endlessly following symlinks, and to make expr.c
3137(in pending) understand == and regex matches. (Speaking of expr, it gets
3138priority groupings wrong but the bug was actually in the posix spec's
3139HTML conversion. They fixed the posix spec upstream for us. Still need
3140to fix the expr code, but it's in pending for a reason...)</p>
3141
3142<p>Some commands grew new option flags, such as cp --remove-destination
3143and touch -h.</p>
3144
3145<p>The parallel build has better error reporting now. When toybox needs to
3146re-exec itself to regain suid root permissions and hasn't got the suid bit,
3147it now gives the right error message ("not root" instead of "no such command").
3148
3149<p>Added a test to "mount" to not mount the same device/directory combination
3150over itself (the OS catches this for block devices, but not for tmpfs).
3151Make blkid distinguish ext3 from ext4. Added catv back into cat (because
3152the Android guys wanted it, and they have historical usage on their side,
3153so...). Handle nanoseconds in touch.</p>
3154
3155<p>Fixed a segfault when CP_MORE was disabled (the resulting option flag list
3156no longer defined -d but still had it in option groups at the end).
3157Workaround for glibc redefining dirname() and basename() to random non-posix
3158semantics because gnu. (They could have created dirname_r() but didn't want
3159to.)</p>
3160
3161<p>Fix an ifconfig test that was preventing assigning an ipv4 address to
3162interface aliases. Several cleanup passes on hwclock but not quite
3163promoted out of pending yet.<p>
3164
3165<p>Fixed a wrong error message in rm (if you had a chmod 000 directory and
3166did rm -r on it without -f, after the prompt it would complain it was a
3167directory, which was not the problem).</p>
3168
3169<p>The gzip compression code now does "store only" output to stdout, for
3170what that's worth.</p>
3171
3172<p>Cleanup mountpoint and expand, and remove them from toys/pending/README
3173(a list of commands that predate the toys/pending directory but needed
3174another pass).</p>
3175
3176<h3>Library and infrastructure:</h3>
3177
3178<p>Reworked the option parsing infrastructure so more commands build
3179standalone (via scripts/single.sh or "make change"). The option flag bit
3180values are no longer packed, it leaves spaces where currently disabled
3181flags go, and you can #define FORCE_FLAGS so disabled flags aren't zeroed.
3182This allows multiple commands to more easily share infrastructure, even if
3183your current flag context is for a disabled command (switched off in config),
3184you can force them to stay on and as long as the flags read the same right
3185to left they'll have the same values.</p>
3186
3187<p>We've started removing use of strncpy() because it's a hugely broken
3188standard C function: the length is the maximum length to _append_, not
3189the size of the destination buffer. It memsets the remaining space it didn't
3190copy ala "memset(dest+strlen(dest), 0, len);" so
3191if you think len is the size of dest you're guaranteed to stomp memory off the
3192end). And if it runs out of space it won't null terminate because reasons.
3193(Meanwhile sprintf("%*s", len, str) is counting wide characters in your current
3194locale, so if you set a locale other than "C" it will also go past your
3195allocated buffer size. Whoever is maintining the C library standards is really
3196bad at strings.)
3197Instead we have xstrncat() which will error_exit() if src+dest+1 doesn't
3198fit in the buffer. (Because randomly truncating input data isn't necessarily
3199an improvement.) And there's always xmprintf().</p>
3200
3201<p>Similarly, strtol() doesn't return an error indicator on overflow,
3202you have to clear and then check errno. So new xstrtol() that cares
3203about overflow.</p>
3204
3205<p>The bionic and musl guys agree faccessat(AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) is not
3206supported, so stop using it.</p>
3207
3208<p>Fixed toy_exec() to detect when argc is in optargs, so we don't
3209need a separate xexec_optargs().</p>
3210
3211<a name="18-02-2015" /><a href="#18-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 18, 2015</b></h2></a>
3212<p>Dreamhost continues to be unable to make mailing list archives work, so
3213here's <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>another
3214list archive</a> with a less awkward interface than gmane.</p>
3215
3216<p>(Neither gives you the convenient historical monthly views of mailman,
3217but I still have hopes dreamhost will someday figure out what they're doing
3218wrong. They've only been trying since October. Last month they did a
3219<a href=http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2015/01/14/discussion-list-hardware-maintenance/>hardware upgrade to fix a software problem</a>, and the stale
3220data loads much faster now, so that's something.)</p>
3221
3222<p>Update (Feb 19): the archive started updating again, by discarding
3223all the pending data. So there are now _two_ giant holes in Dreamhost's
3224web archive, from Dec 15-Jan 3, and then another hole from Jan 16-Feb 18.
3225The relevant messages are in both of the other archives. Here's hoping
3226the chronic archive constipation problem won't happen a sixth time.</p>
3227
3228<a name="30-12-2014" /><a href="#30-12-2014"><hr><h2><b>December 30, 2014</b></h2></a>
3229<p>Due to Dreamhost's <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>ongoing</a>
3230<a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>inability</a> to make mailman
3231work reliably, I've added a link to a backup web archive at
3232<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>gmane</a> to the nav bar
3233on the left.</p>
3234
3235<p>You still subscribe to the list through
3236<a href=http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net>the first link</a>.</p>
3237
3238<p>Update (January 27, 2015): they're <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/558428839462703104>still working on it</a>.</p>
3239
3240<a name="19-11-2014" /><a href="#19-11-2014"><hr><h2><b>November 19, 2014</b></h2></a>
3241
3242<blockquote><p>"This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
3243
3244<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.1</a>
3245(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1566>commit 1566</a>) is out.</p>
3246
3247<p>It's an interim release, mostly bugfixes. There are several new commands,
3248but they're all in pending.</p>
3249
3250<h3>Development</h3>
3251
3252<p>Finally implemented sed, which is still in pending because although
3253it's feature complete according to posix, and even passes the parts of
3254Busybox's sed test suite that aren't explicitly testing for gnu bugs we
3255don't want to copy, it's not yet good enough to build Linux From Scratch.
3256(The ./configure stages use very long sed scripts. 20 commits worth of
3257implementation and debugging, just under 1000 lines of code, and there's
3258still more to do. We're definitely up to some of the "fiddly" commands now.
3259Did you know "echo hello | sed p - -" segfaults gnu sed in Ubuntu 12.04?
3260Yeah...)</p>
3261
3262<p>Talked with the Tizen developers to follow up on their desire to
3263make toybox a part of the base Tizen system, and got a list of commands
3264to add to the roadmap. The tizen todo list is:</p>
3265
3266<blockquote><p>
3267wget, sha256*, gzip, gunzip, bunzip2, rsync, zdiff*,
3268less, ar, arch, base64, csplit, dir, fmt, join, 
3269nproc, shred, shuf, stdbuf, stty, test, tr, unexpand,
3270users, vdir, diff3, sdiff, dosfsck (fsck.vfat), awk, fdisk
3271</p></blockquote>
3272
3273<p>(Most of which was already on the todo list, but it helps prioritize.)</p>
3274
3275<p>Fixed md5sum and sha1sum on big endian systems (reported by James McMechan).
3276Andy Lutomirski fixed unshare's help text and option parsing,
3277and submitted nsenter (a tool to use setns(2)) to pending.
3278Isaac Dunham implemented acpi -ctV options, and spotted the bug that ls -d
3279was inappropraitely following command line symlinks without -H or -L (it
3280should act like ls -l does), and ls -F handles symlinks wrong too.
3281Lukasz Szpakowski sent in two bugfixes to tail.c. Cynt Rynt spotted an
3282unnecessary assignment in lib/password.c.</p>
3283
3284<p>Ashwini Sharma's team was as busy as usual, submitting tr, crontab, and
3285ipcrm, and hwclock to pending, more features to the pending ip.c, and a
3286pile of bugfixes (to chgrp, killall, ifconfig, insmod,
3287losetup, comm, cp, id, xwrap, netcat, modprobe, nohup...) mostly found by
3288static analysis. (These fixes are mostly to seldom-used codepaths like the
3289TOYBOX_FREE config option, but test coverage is always appreciated.) Ashwini
3290also suggested upgrading ln -f to leave the original target alone if link
3291creation fails, and reported that mv -f and -i weren't implemented (now fixed).</p>
3292
3293<p>New config option: TOYBOX_NORECURSE prevents xexec() from making internal
3294function calls (for nommu systems with a finite stack).</p>
3295
3296<p>The "toybox" multiplexer command no longer adds a trailing space to each
3297line of command names, so things like "./toybox | tr ' \n' '|'" to create
3298a grep pattern snippet are easier to do. (Why you'd want to is your business,
3299but the output is tidier now.)</p>
3300
3301<h3>Infrastructure</h3>
3302
3303<p>Isaac Dunham added Android support to portability.h, including compile
3304probes for functions missing from bionic-libc, and annotated the commands that
3305use those functions. We haven't really tested building against bionic,
3306but in theory it's possible now.</p>
3307
3308<p>Running the test suite now color codes the PASS/SKIP/FAIL notifications
3309if output is to a tty. (And in case you missed it last time, VERBOSE=fail
3310to stop at the first failure is really useful.)</p>
3311
3312<p>In loopfiles_rw() use O_CLOEXEC instead of O_RDONLY to request the loop
3313function close filehandles for us. (Otherwise the callback function must
3314close each supplied filehandle itself.)</p>
3315
3316<p>The printf-style escape parsing ("\n" and friends) got factored out into
3317a new unescape() function.</p>
3318
3319<a name="02-10-2014" /><a href="#02-10-2014"><hr><h2><b>October 2, 2014</b></h2></a>
3320<blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
3321The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss...
3322Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the
3323difficulties."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy<p></blockquote>
3324
3325<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a>
3326(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p>
3327
3328<h3>New commands</h3>
3329
3330<p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands
3331(cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p>
3332
3333<p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now
3334ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth
3335instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving
3336looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to
3337cut, touch, free, and id.</p>
3338
3339<p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini
3340Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded
3341fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code.
3342Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p>
3343
3344<h3>Build infrastructure</h3>
3345
3346<p><b>Parallel builds</b></p>
3347
3348<p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of
3349processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.)
3350Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain
3351about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now
3352gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p>
3353
3354<p><b>Standalone builds</b></p>
3355
3356<p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to
3357build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file
3358selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro
3359for the command. It enables each command's
3360sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build
3361full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when
3362the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro
3363now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY
3364without the NEWTOY</p>
3365
3366<p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that
3367aren't building standalone yet are:</p>
3368
3369<blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos,
3370whoami</p></blockquote>
3371
3372<p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY()
3373entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries
3374that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure
3375is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command
3376is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the
3377code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible
3378to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting
3379design goals in the two contexts.)</p>
3380
3381<p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual
3382commands.
3383
3384<p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p>
3385
3386<p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh
3387containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current
3388configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an
3389exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite
3390got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p>
3391
3392<h3>Internals</h3>
3393
3394<p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking
3395filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now
3396done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added
3397to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now
3398requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false).
3399Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various
3400pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can
3401use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode.
3402Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether
3403we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p>
3404
3405<p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges
3406(which happens when you suid something _other_ than root).
3407The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the
3408command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled),
3409toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse
3410internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth),
3411always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when
3412we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes,
3413dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in
3414error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an
3415option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments
3416saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched
3417off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio.
3418Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall
3419with no arguments (segfaulted).</p>
3420
3421<p><b>Portability</b></p>
3422
3423<p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx
3424to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl
3425maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed
3426instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section
3427to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your
3428build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do
3429a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make
3430it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns
3431requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch
3432to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current
3433musl source control.)</p>
3434
3435<p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have
3436another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p>
3437
3438<p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p>
3439
3440<p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small
3441allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing
3442"$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic
3443is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux
3444filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters
3445we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd),
3446newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in
3447filesystem).</p>
3448
3449<h3>Documentation</h3>
3450
3451<p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html
3452documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently
3453(it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p>
3454
3455<p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup
3456before the pending directory was added.</p>
3457
3458<h3>Test Suite</h3>
3459
3460<p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the
3461testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p>
3462
3463<p>Johan Bergström requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to
3464stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu
3465sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p>
3466
3467<p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat,
3468and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p>
3469
3470<a name="07-07-2014" /><a href="#07-07-2014"><hr><h2><b>July 7, 2014</b></h2></a>
3471<blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this:
3472most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many
3473solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely
3474concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd
3475because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were
3476unhappy."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
3477
3478<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>
3479
3480<p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include:
3481lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs,
3482killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han,
3483sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh,
3484host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p>
3485
3486<p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending):
3487sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5,
3488fallocate, and nbd-client.</p>
3489
3490<p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps,
3491bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd,
3492login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's
3493still more to do on all of those.)</p>
3494
3495<p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against
3496musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't
3497support that target yet.)</p>
3498
3499<p><b>Documentation:</b></p>
3500
3501<p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with
3502a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the
3503"coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show
3504stopper for incoming
3505contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them
3506during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes
3507the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p>
3508
3509<p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the
3510full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p>
3511
3512<p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is
3513a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more
3514elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option
3515parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p>
3516
3517<p><b>Fixes</b>:</p>
3518
3519<p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default
3520output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported
3521bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init()
3522was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound)
3523had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be
3524there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at
3525the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test
3526in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return
3527success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and
3528ferror() from xprintf().</p>
3529
3530<p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff
3531implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some
3532diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from
3533a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops
3534at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set,
3535which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of
3536chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p>
3537
3538<p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final
3539build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of
3540libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p>
3541
3542<p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes,
3543so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities.
3544So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the
3545setup code to setlocale().</p>
3546
3547<p><b>Upgrades:</b></p>
3548
3549<p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it
3550to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also
3551added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database
3552parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p>
3553
3554<p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making
3555it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum
3556for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other
3557implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p>
3558
3559<p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname),
3560the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get
3561a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p>
3562
3563<p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP
3564command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p>
3565
3566<p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always
3567build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p>
3568
3569<p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so
3570we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0
3571filename" actually works again.</p>
3572
3573<p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd,
3574and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill,
3575groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still
3576working to fix them.</p>
3577
3578<p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a
3579dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new
3580generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte
3581to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's
3582initialized to in toy_init).</p>
3583
3584<p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and
3585use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro
3586contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs
3587decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion
3588bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you
3589cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the
3590first one, the build break is now more informative).</p>
3591
3592<a name="20-04-2014" /><a href="#20-04-2014"><hr><h2><b>April 20, 2014</b></h2></a>
3593<blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer
3594which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks
3595had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as
3596far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to
3597turn it off.</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
3598
3599<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on
3600<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And
3601about time too.</p>
3602
3603<p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h,
3604that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text
3605from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines.
3606There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p>
3607
3608<p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the
3609way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the
3610<a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk,
3611Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p>
3612
3613<p><b>In pending:</b>
3614Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more,
3615groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added
3616ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty.
3617Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold.
3618I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in
3619compress.c, and still  need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side)
3620and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p>
3621
3622<p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot,
3623cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus
3624in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some
3625work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations
3626documented what their output actually meant).</p>
3627
3628<p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to
3629handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the
3630fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h
3631options (all commands, html output).
3632Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually
3633set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross
3634compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween
3635sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code.
3636Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options
3637to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and
3638allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded
3639tftpd.  Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after
3640that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting.
3641Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of
3642pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified
3643find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on
3644the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions
3645now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with
3646aliasing.</p>
3647
3648<p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you
3649can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same
3650.c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the
3651bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example.
3652i
3653<p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers
3654not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h
3655was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc
3656configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p>
3657
3658<p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig
3659build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily
3660the absolute latest build environment.)</p>
3661
3662<p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid().
3663xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd
3664and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command,
3665get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and
3666xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into
3667bzcat.c.</p>
3668
3669<p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the
3670help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output.
3671The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about
3672#including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The
3673<a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading
3674of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for
3675good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion
3676at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p>
3677
3678<a name="18-11-2013" /><a href="#18-11-2013"><hr><h2><b>November 18, 2013</b></h2></a>
3679<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."</p><p>-
3680The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
3681
3682<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.7.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.7</a> is based on
3683<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p>
3684
3685<p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted
3686reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from
3687pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some
3688cleanup.</p>
3689
3690<p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going
3691into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted
3692dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and
3693an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p>
3694
3695<p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer
3696added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem.
3697William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input
3698(the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug
3699where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault).
3700I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using
3701the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a
3702synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with
3703$CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted
3704a typo in the web page.</p>
3705
3706<p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from
3707bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by
3708--longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal
3709querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a
3710debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply).
3711The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and
3712micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite
3713now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p>
3714
3715<a name="17-09-2013" /><a href="#17-09-2013"><hr><h2><b>September 17, 2013</b></h2></a>
3716<blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number."
3717Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway
3718station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function,
3719and this might turn out to be it.</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
3720</blockquote>
3721
3722<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on
3723<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p>
3724
3725<p>This release adds
3726several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han
3727submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and
3728a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted
3729acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p>
3730
3731<p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker).
3732The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah"
3733instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in.
3734Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain
3735other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who
3736heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID
3737namespace support.</p>
3738
3739<h3>Pending</h3>
3740
3741<p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should
3742probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd,
3743dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from
3744Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet),
3745syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar,
3746test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E.
3747M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p>
3748
3749<p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't
3750ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig
3751and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up
3752logger and syslogd...</p>
3753
3754<p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory,
3755but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du,
3756expand, and touch.</p> 
3757
3758<h3>Infrastructure</h3>
3759
3760<p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the
3761multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes,
3762OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a
3763command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If
3764you're curious, you can do:</p>
3765
3766<blockquote><pre>
3767make defconfig
3768make
3769mkdir singles
3770for i in $(./toybox)
3771do
3772  echo $i
3773  PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break
3774done
3775</pre>
3776<p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p>
3777</blockquote>
3778
3779<p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this
3780time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p>
3781
3782<p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions
3783not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains
3784functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit).
3785This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p>
3786
3787<p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude
3788logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts
3789should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ;
3790option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E.
3791--color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p>
3792
3793<p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf
3794does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it
3795for us".</p>
3796
3797<p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid().
3798It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite
3799so much anymore.</p>
3800
3801<p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly
3802linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are
3803using it now.</p>
3804
3805<p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag
3806(-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables)
3807that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept
3808into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler,
3809"-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p>
3810
3811<h3>Bugfixes</h3>
3812
3813<p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to
3814finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f
3815someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once).
3816Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p>
3817
3818<p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that
3819python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks
3820for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer
3821then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p>
3822
3823<p>Ashwini Sharma
3824pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some
3825configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p>
3826
3827<p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and
3828a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p> 
3829
3830<p>The new function xexec_optargs()
3831replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs
3832during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p>
3833
3834<p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which
3835didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup
3836between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh
3837command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p>
3838
3839<p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't
3840delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm
3841should now be fixed.</p>
3842
3843<p>
3844<a name="26-07-2013" /><a href="#26-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 26, 2013</b></h2></a>
3845<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git
3846mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the
3847mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches
3848against it and post them to the list.</p>
3849
3850<a name="02-07-2013" /><a href="#02-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 2, 2013</b></h2></a>
3851<blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You
3852should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people
3853like you."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
3854
3855<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on
3856<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds
3857uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by
3858default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and
3859enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups".
3860Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv".
3861</p>
3862
3863<p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and
3864each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help"
3865and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p>
3866
3867<p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client,
3868logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup.
3869Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up.
3870(It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p>
3871
3872<p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach
3873more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The
3874<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis
3875of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p>
3876
3877<p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected,
3878condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught
3879-l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices.
3880Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking),
3881and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no
3882corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work).
3883Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham
3884fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output
3885field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means
3886to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda
3887moved file permission display code to lib so ls and
3888stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the
3889last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it
3890(ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user).
3891</p>
3892
3893<p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global
3894variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc
3895debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and
3896that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of
3897just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking
3898against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes
3899for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes
3900various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical
3901(breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names).
3902
3903<p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build
3904system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The
3905release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control.
3906Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p>
3907</p>
3908
3909<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
3910BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first
3911paragraph now says:</p>
3912
3913<blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this
3914software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote>
3915
3916<p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this
3917permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all
3918copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects
3919that 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
3920both 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
3921less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate
3922the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p>
3923
3924<p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more
3925or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it
3926BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p>
3927
3928<a name="21-03-2013" /><a href="#21-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 21, 2013</b></h2></a>
3929<p>Video of my ELC talk
3930"<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>"
3931is up on youtube. Related materials include the
3932<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an
3933<a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p>
3934
3935<p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about
3936the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p>
3937
3938<ul>
3939<li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li>
3940  <ul>
3941  <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li>
3942  <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li>
3943  </ul>
3944<li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li>
3945  <ul>
3946  <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li>
3947  </ul>
3948<li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li>
3949<li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li>
3950<li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li>
3951  <ul>
3952  <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li>
3953  <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li>
3954    <ul>
3955    <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li>
3956    <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li>
3957    </ul>
3958  </ul>
3959</ul>
3960</span>
3961
3962
3963<a name="14-03-2013" /><a href="#14-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 14, 2013</b></h2></a>
3964<blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." -
3965</p><p>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
3966
3967<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on
3968<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding
3969the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p>
3970
3971<p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes
3972getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds.
3973"id -Gn root" should now print root's groups
3974instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under
3975Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you
3976can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p>
3977
3978<p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending".
3979Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig.
3980Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig
3981should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p>
3982
3983<p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries
3984(klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p>
3985
3986<a name="18-01-2013" /><a href="#18-01-2013"><hr><h2><b>January 18, 2013</b></h2></a>
3987<blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
3988
3989<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on
3990<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There
3991are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the
3992<a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p>
3993
3994<p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s
3995and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to
3996kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite.
3997Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p>
3998
3999<p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and
4000readlink commands. The segfault in ls
4001happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the
4002default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an
4003extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing
4004a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath()
4005code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test
4006suite checks for it).</p>
4007
4008<p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the
4009error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's
4010still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error
4011bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That
4012means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right
4013error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.)
4014Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG
4015doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with
4016at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic
4017(and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma).
4018dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree
4019functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using
4020libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means
4021it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p>
4022
4023<p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that
4024disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back
4025to -Os by default now.</p>
4026
4027<a name="15-12-2012" /><a href="#15-12-2012"><hr><h2><b>December 15, 2012</b></h2></a>
4028<blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a
4029thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly
4030go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
4031</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
4032
4033<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on
4034<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is
4035just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal
4036Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's
4037a new stable version.</p>
4038
4039<p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch
4040(from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a
4041bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8
4042support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option.
4043Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof.
4044The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports
4045-fenq.</p>
4046
4047<p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library,
4048and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel
4049features we depend on start to drop out).</p>
4050
4051<p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per
4052level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more
4053than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out,
4054or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an
4055earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README,
4056the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory
4057(so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p>
4058
4059<p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist().
4060Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with
4061full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to
4062stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing
4063it).</p>
4064
4065<p>The open group broke their website so the
4066<a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008
4067now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with
4068pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while
4069I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p>
4070
4071<p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant
4072because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current
4073implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option
4074to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks,
4075but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024
4076filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p>
4077
4078<a name="13-11-2012" /><a href="#13-11-2012"><hr><h2><b>November 13, 2012</b></h2></a>
4079<blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins."
4080</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
4081
4082<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on
4083<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p>
4084
4085<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and
4086Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and
4087md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix,
4088unix2dos).</p>
4089
4090<p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by
4091default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name.
4092Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p>
4093
4094<p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into
4095"posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008,
4096the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig
4097and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on).
4098An android directory is planned (see the updated
4099<a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p>
4100
4101<p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's
4102global block are now automatically generated, commands should
4103#define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that
4104command.</p>
4105
4106<p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and -
4107in them, such as switch_root.</p>
4108
4109<p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of
4110uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers.
4111The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
4112properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
4113fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage
4114calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp
4115and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces
4116break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
4117properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
4118fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib
4119fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary
4120on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending
4121on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in
4122a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking
4123partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts:
4124this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it
4125wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite
4126some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to
4127successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc
4128versions was added to portability.h.</p>
4129
4130<p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a
4131rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All
4132the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards
4133document, where applicable.</p>
4134
4135<p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into
4136a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p>
4137
4138<p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're
4139back now.</p>
4140</span>
4141
4142<a name="23-07-2012" /><a href="#23-07-2012"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2012</b></h2></a>
4143<blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys
4144out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked
4145out."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
4146
4147<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on
4148<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p>
4149
4150<p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from
4151the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p>
4152
4153<p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed
4154taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han
4155contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a
4156case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p>
4157
4158<p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the
4159<a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and
4160<a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option
4161to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime),
4162fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the
4163corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding
4164glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing
4165pending output on exit.</p>
4166
4167<a name="25-06-2012" /><a href="#25-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 25, 2012</b></h2></a>
4168<blockquote><p>"For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
4169
4170<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit
4171<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's
4172mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than
4173x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which
4174now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test
4175suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the
4176musl libc.</p>
4177
4178<p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here
4179it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40
4180pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p>
4181</span>
4182
4183<a name="12-06-2012" /><a href="#12-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 12, 2012</b></h2></a>
4184<blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that
4185he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the
4186wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was
4187muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had
4188always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely
4189the same reasons."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
4190
4191<p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>,
4192so here it is, based
4193on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the
4194statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should
4195actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting
4196that).</p>
4197
4198<p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development
4199doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course.
4200The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which
4201threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit
4202more frequent from here on.</p>
4203
4204<p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory
4205tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that
4206which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p>
4207
4208<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown,
4209chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if
4210you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug
4211on slackware.</p>
4212
4213<p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and
4214mkdir -m).  Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint,
4215vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups.
4216Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p>
4217
4218<p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell
4219wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove
4220deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and
4221musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got
4222some cleanups and bugfixes.</p>
4223
4224<p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not
4225to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's
4226problematic).</p>
4227
4228<p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now,
4229yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the
4230SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox
4231multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer
4232segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full
4233posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next
4234release.)</p>
4235
4236<p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros
4237for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue
4238is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p>
4239
4240<p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built
4241Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that
4242'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing.
4243(The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted
4244yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before
42451.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p>
4246
4247
4248<a name="03-03-2012" /><a href="#03-03-2012"><hr><h2><b>March 3, 2012</b></h2></a>
4249
4250<blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral
4251without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them.
4252Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking
4253for all these years."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
4254</p></blockquote>
4255
4256<p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based
4257on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>.  This
4258time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt
4259binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p>
4260
4261<p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I
4262have not quite been keeping up.)</p>
4263
4264<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod,
4265insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename.  Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln,
4266realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall.  Daniel
4267Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests
4268for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp.
4269Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed
4270cross compiling to work more reliably.</p>
4271
4272<p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's
4273code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new
4274code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python
4275bloat-o-meter.)</p>
4276
4277<p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from
4278Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott,
4279more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano
4280Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and
4281optimizations.</p>
4282
4283<p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link,
4284dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months
4285and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p>
4286
4287
4288<a name="12-02-2012" /><a href="#12-02-2012"><hr><h2><b>February 12, 2012</b></h2></a>
4289<blockquote><p>
4290"for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at
4291least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two
4292important respects..."</p>
4293<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
4294
4295<p>Here's the first BSD licensed release,
4296<a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization
4297point than anything particularly useful.  47 commands in a reasonably
4298ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially
4299finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several
4300patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p>
4301
4302<p>More to come...</p>
4303
4304<hr>
4305<a name="15-11-2011" /><a href="#15-11-2011"><hr><h2><b>November 15, 2011</b></h2></a>
4306- Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2
4307clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line
4308implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p>
4309
4310<p>More to come...</p>
4311
4312<hr>
4313
4314<p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p>
4315
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4317