1 <html><head><title>toybox news</title> 2 <!--#include file="header.html" --> 3 4 <p>Toybox combines common Linux command line utilities together 5 into a single BSD-licensed executable that's simple, small, fast, 6 reasonably standards-compliant, and powerful enough to turn Android into 7 a development environment. See the links on the left for details.</p> 8 9 <h2>News</h2> 10 11 <a name="19-06-2017" /><a href="#19-06-2017"><hr><h2><b>June 19, 2017</b></h2></a> 12 <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. 13 To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.</p> 14 <p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 15 </blockquote> 16 17 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.4.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.4</a> 18 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.4>git commit</a>) 19 is out. No new commands this time, but 20 <b>chrt</b> and <b>dmesg</b> got promoted out of pending.</p> 21 22 <p><u>New features</u>: 23 Rob rewrote paste, which should work much better now, and added grep 24 -M and -S to match and skip wildcards respectively (useful with -r). 25 Elliott's updated dmesg has -T and --color. The file 26 command can recognize gzip now, uptime grew -s, date grew %N, env knows - as a first argument 27 means -i (posix!) and grew -0, ls defaults to -b 28 instead of -q now when there's a tty, and ls has a new -ll option (with 29 --full-time as a compatibility synonym) showing nanoseconds and (for some 30 reason) timezone. (Why do individual files have timezones?) Elliott added 31 "uudecode -o -" support. Illya Kuzmich taught head -v and -q. The cpio 32 code no longer adds the "TRAILER!!!" entry by default (initramfs extractor 33 doesn't care) without which you can concatenate cpio archives with "cat". 34 (Use the new --trailer option if you want the legacy behavior.) 35 In pending, fdisk compiles now and tar understands bzip2.</p> 36 37 <p><u>Build</u>: 38 The "make install_airlock" target now symlinks bc from the host because 39 the kernel <a href=https://landley.net/notes-2013.html#28-03-2013>inexplicably</a> 40 needs that to build. This was motivated by 41 <a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a>, which builds under 42 a toybox airlock directory.</p> 43 44 <p>Lots of work on the test suite, mostly from the Android guys who are now 45 running it under Android. This fixed several existing tests that didn't 46 pass, made more tests run on a toybox-only system, and so on. The test suite 47 infrastructure now has a second testing function, 48 "testcmd", which supplies the command name being tested (bypassing 49 shell builtins).</p> 50 51 <p>Various android build and config fixes, getting closer to being able 52 to let android someday use scripts/make.sh instead of generated/* snapshots. 53 Also more work into building under android's NDK; not quite there yet 54 but much closer. 55 Use nproc in scripts/make.sh detect available processors (so you can control the SMP level with taskset). 56 Removed the old uClibc compatibility glue, it's been 5 years since their 57 <a href=http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2016-December/180102.html>last release</a>.</p> 58 59 <p>The new config option TOYBOX_PEDANTIC_ARGS checks arguments when there 60 are no arguments, so things like "uptime" no longer silently ignore arguments 61 you pass but instead refuse to run.</p> 62 63 <p><u>Docs</u>: 64 The FAQ now has more than one entry. Commands no longer output the full 65 help text for argument errors but instead just say "See %s --help" with the 66 command name (in addition to the actual error message). 67 Elliott did a big period-ectomy on all the --help text, and 68 we cleaned up some tab/space inconsistency. The 69 non-html help -a output now has separators with the command name. 70 The top/iotop and pkill/pgrep help text now describe a lot more of what 71 the commands can do. Twitter's code of conduct page went down so we 72 mirrored the text locally.</p> 73 74 <p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 75 Fixed a race condition in ps/top where a process that exited right as we 76 read its data returned a different error value than we were expecting (which 77 was causing long-running top instances to occasionally exit), 78 mount now gives an error if it can't autodetect the filesystem 79 type, ps no longer queries the terminal size when output isn't to a tty 80 (so "ps -A | cat" doesn't vary), date's chkmktime() was replaced with 81 simple range checks for fields (to avoid false positives from things like 82 timezones and daylight savings time), removed %s from date's help (we 83 didn't implement it, we have @seconds[.nanoseconds] instead), fixed 84 zcat's buffer flush logic (which was always failing on files larger 85 than 32k), and factor now detects requests for numbers >64 bits and fails 86 loudly instead of producing incorrect answers. 87 Elliott fixed touch -a/-m (they were backwards), and allowed ':' in 88 setprop's property names. Grep now exits with 2 for errors (so -q can 89 distinguish "didn't find" from "didn't work"), doesn't stop on symlinks 90 that point nowhere (there was an error_exit() that should just be a warning), 91 and provides error messages for files we could open but not read.</p> 92 93 <p><u>Library</u>: 94 New library functions: strend() complements strstart(), minof()/maxof() 95 are min/max macros that evalute arguments once and autodetect type (why 96 isn't this in libc?), xmmap() checks MAP_FAILED (which is not NULL).</p> 97 98 <a name="21-02-2017" /><a href="#21-02-2017"><hr><h2><b>February 21, 2017</b></h2></a> 99 <blockquote><p>Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the 100 Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention 101 away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.</p> 102 <p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 103 104 <p>Despite everything, <a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.3.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.3</a> 105 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.3>git commit</a>) 106 is out. The <u>new commands</u> this time are <b>ftpget</b>, <b>ftpput</b>, <b>microcom</b>, and <b>ascii</b>.<p> 107 108 <p>We also had two command _demotions_ out of defconfig: 109 <b>hostid</b> got moved to toys/example and 110 switched to "default n" because despite <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/gethostid.html>still being in posix</a> 111 the concept of a unique 32 bit number identifying a system is something 112 Linux outgrew about the time Pauline Middelink wrote the first IP 113 Masquerading code. And Elliott did a complete rewrite of <b>dmesg</b> introducing 114 two codepaths that I didn't get a chance to unify and didn't want to 115 hold up the release for, so that's back in pending.</p> 116 117 <p><u>New features</u>: Rob added units to <b>find</b> -atime and friends 118 (with the legacy -amin alias). Elliott added color and -w to dmesg, fallocate 119 -o, and improved file's ELF parsing. Steve Muckle added -d and finit_module 120 support to modprobe. Rob and Elliott tweaked the 121 ps/top display format a bit more (extending the USER field from 8 to 18 chars 122 and putting + at the end of string fields that got truncated). 123 df -a isn't entirely new, but wasn't documented and needed a bugfix.</p> 124 125 <p><u>Bugfixes</u>: 126 Last release broke oneit because -c didn't get moved to xopen_stdio() (oops). 127 Rob and Elliott simultaneously spotted ps padding each line to 99999 128 chars when there's no tty (serial console or adb); now it pads to 80 in 129 that case but also switches on -w to avoid field truncation. The "tty" 130 field also sometimes had trailing debris (that's fixed now). And "top" was 131 endlessly redrawing with out tty because receipt of the ANSI size probe 132 results would set SIGWINCH, and handling that sent another ansi probe. (Sigh.) 133 And while we're there, replace "ADDR" with "BIT" in ps -l so there are 134 more than 4 chars left for the "CMD" field on 64 bit systems.</p> 135 136 <p>Izabera pointed out that split -b and -l can't mix, and suggested seq should 137 multiply to avoid accumulating rounding errors from repeated fractional 138 increments. Wang Xiao Jian fixed a bug in sort -k. 139 Elliott let getprop use the @ character in property names, and 140 Dimitry Ivanov removed the name length limit for system properties. 141 Elliott also improved some error reporting and improved top -H's display 142 of thread names. 143 144 <p>Josh Gao pointed out that recursive operations on . and .. could be ignored 145 in chmod -R (and the resulting generic fix to dirtree_notdotdot() fixed 146 it in several other places).</p> 147 148 <p>Justin Cormack caught tar producing a warning to stdout that screwed up 149 "tar c" to stdout. 150 Rob fixed an option parsing bug (where switching off a --longopt in menuconfig 151 confused the parser), and another one where an option excluding itself 152 (ala "abc[-ab][!abc]" with "command -a -b") would segfault.</p> 153 154 <p>There's some sort of gcc stack over-optimization bug where musl-libc's 155 version of vfork() doesn't get marked with attribute(returns_twice) so 156 stack varabiles in the same function after that get semi-randomly overwritten 157 when the optimizer decides to reclaim the space. So add the attribute 158 to the function the XVFORK() wrapper macro calls. (It's a nommu thing.)</p> 159 160 <p>Fixed a couple variable size mismatch bugs that were only tested on 64 bit 161 (printf %x 64) or only tested on 32 bit (modprobe), removed some 162 unnecessary casts in stat.</p> 163 164 <p>Continuing attempts to build under Android NDK brought up that posix 165 defines the global 'stdout' as a macro, which older versions of bionic 166 turned into an array member, but a function was using it as an argument 167 name. (This worked in the AOSP build because it only builds against current 168 bionic, where there's a global 'stdout'.)</p> 169 170 <p>Several commits argued with clang's warning generation, eventually 171 settling on a variant of __attribute__((__shut_up__)).</p> 172 173 <p>Android should no longer give spurious error messages 174 when you "ps -A | head" about EPIPE on output. (Older versions of bionic 175 set an error handler on SIGPIPE, but it shouldn't do that now. More recent 176 versions of adb set the SIGPIPE handler to SIGIGN instead of SIGDFL, 177 leading to write returning an error message instead of silently killing 178 the program. So we set it back to the default.)</p> 179 180 <p><u>Docs</u>: 181 Removed website link to the gmane archive (which didn't survive gmane's 182 change of ownership). The FAQ now answers a _second_ question. (Woo!) 183 Some roadmap updates.</p> 184 185 <p><u>Build tweaks</u>: 186 Upgraded "make install_airlock" target to only warn about missing 187 commands (unless $PEDANTIC is set) when it sets up the hermetic build 188 path. (The plan is still to implement everything but the toolchain 189 binaries in toybox, but in the meantime we're symlinking other stuff from 190 the $HOST that isn't ready yet. See 191 <a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> for an example using 192 this.)</p> 193 194 <p>Elliott and Rob continue to poke at building toybox with Android's NDK, 195 but it's a work in progress (<a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-December/008767.html>thread</a>). Various changes 196 removing libcutils dependencies and adding an selinux dependency to getprop 197 are fallout from this.</p> 198 199 <p>Cross-compiling from Macs needs to use "gsed" instead of apple's 200 version, so teach the build to use that name if it exists in the $PATH. 201 If you try to build without running config first, you should get better 202 error reporting now. Added a workaround for Centos' broken "which" command 203 producing output when it _can't_ find a name in the $PATH.</p> 204 205 <p><u>Library</u>: 206 The new dirtree flag DIRTREE_PROC skips non-numeric entries so things 207 like ps and top can scan /proc more efficiently.</p> 208 209 <a name="21-10-2016" /><a href="#21-10-2016"><hr><h2><b>October 21, 2016</b></h2></a> 210 <blockquote><p>Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat, 211 we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your 212 own problem.</p><p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 213 214 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.2</a> 215 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.2>git commit</a>) 216 is out.</p> 217 218 <p>During this development cycle, Elliott Hughes <a href=http://androidbackstage.blogspot.com/2016/07/episode-53-adb-on-adb.html>got interviewed 219 on the ADB podcast</a> 220 and 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>). 221 Both talk about toybox and many other things. 222 The web page also grew a new <a href=faq.html>FAQ page</a>, currently with 223 just the one.</p> 224 225 <p>New comands added to defconfig are <b>tunctl</b>, 226 <b>log</b>, <b>start</b>, <b>stop</b>, and <b>sendevent</b>. 227 The commands <b>file</b> and <b>netstat</b> got promoted out of pending. 228 Pending added <b>chrt</b>, <b>setfattr</b>, and <b>getfattr</b>, and saw 229 a lot of cleanups to diffstat and dd but not enough to promote them to 230 defconfig yet. A new toys/net directory was added, moving ifconfig, netcat, 231 netstat, rfkill, and tunctl there so far.</p> 232 233 <p><b>Upgrades</b>: All commands now parse --version when they understand 234 --help, but "true" and "false" should now ignore their arguments entirely. 235 We taught stat to handle "%12x" and "%.12x" printf-style escapes, which 236 apparently other versions do. The ifconfig output now shows the interface's 237 device driver. Added patch -d and --dry-run, wc can now do -cm together, 238 find has a NOP -noleaf so scripts that use that don't break, add -c to md5sum 239 and sha1sum. Elliott taught ps to treat extra aguments as additional -p 240 pids, implemented xxd -s, did a number of upgrades to file (added -HL, 241 support for ar files, improved ELF support to report android API level 242 and stripped/not stripped and it no longer prints a guessed build ID type). 243 Elliott also added optional build-time support for using openssl's 244 assembly-optimized md5sum/sha1sum implementations (leading to a new 245 <a href=design.html>design</a> policy on shared libraries).</p> 246 247 <p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Too many fixes to "ps" and "touch" to list, from both 248 Elliott and Rob. Rob taught sed to handle s/[[:space:]/]// type sequences 249 properly, switched grep to a better 250 workaround 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, 251 made du max out at 2 terabytes instead of 2 gigabytes on 32-bit systems 252 (it was always designed to, but was missing a typecast), 253 fixed the option parsing infrastructure (config options that remove command 254 line options got the placeholders wrong), fix to printf for printing 255 octal digits and handling the (posix-mandated) difference between %b and 256 non-%b octal output, reading from "-" no longer closes stdin when done, 257 netcat -L works with nommu (although it may need more portability work), 258 and you can now "make test_scankey" if you want to. Several commands 259 (stat, makedeves, chgrp, cp, find) handled user name lookup failure badly 260 (stat was segfaulting if you interrogated a file belonging to a nonexistent 261 user, "chown 12345 file" errored out if you didn't have that user 262 in /etc/passwd... now they should all print/accept the number when 263 appropriate). "LC_ALL=C ls -Cs --color" produces the same output 264 as other versions (two spaces padding, -k hardwired on).<p> 265 266 <p>Kyungsik Lee fixed a bug 267 in cp (readlink() doesn't actually null terminate the string it reads in), 268 Elliott Hughes made pgrep/pkill return success/failure, fixed trailing 269 whitespace in netstat, fixed a SMACK symbol conflict due to linux/xattr.h 270 changing, fixed ls -sh, and added a lot of 271 stuff to the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap page</a>. 272 Izabera pointed out cmp -l and -s can't be selected at the same time, 273 that timeout was never actually checking -v, that ls should default to -q 274 when output is to a tty, and that "file -" would sometimes try to open "-" 275 instead of stdin. 276 Usischev Yury pointed out a use after free error, and that id shouldn't 277 call exit() directly. Matthias Urhahn pointed out that stat(2) returns 278 hardwired 512-byte units, so stat.c was wrong. David Hedges pointed out 279 that route could only handle 10 character interface names when the kernel 280 can do 15 (it's still in pending for a reason, but fixed). Evgenii 281 Stepanov found and helped diagnose one of the more subtle ps bugs fixed 282 this time around.</p> 283 284 <p>Calling "make test_blah" no longer causes make to error out if the last 285 test fails (and thus returns a nonzero error code). 286 Building single commands and the multiplexer used to require a "make clean" 287 between them (because they had different config files both of which were older 288 than generated/config.h so it didn't get rebuilt; now it just always 289 rebuilds it).</p> 290 291 <p>The defconfig build is now slightly less broken on older centos versions 292 (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> 293 294 <p>Several commands were over-using xprintf(), which flushes its output 295 to check for error (something you only need to do maybe once per line, 296 and even then maybe only in loops because xexit() flushes and checks 297 ferror() for you and adjusts the exit code if we wrote stuff to stdout 298 that couldn't be printed). Lots of little flushes are inefficient, 299 so most things can use normal printf(). (Retransmission 300 of short writes is presumably libc's problem since it's buffering the 301 output and all.)</p> 302 303 <p><b>Library:</b> 304 New library functions readlink0() and readlinkat0() which properly null 305 terminates the symlink value (which the stock libc function inexplicably 306 doesn't). 307 The new do_lines() function interates reading lines from a filehandle 308 and calling a function on each line. 309 New function pollinate() factoring out netcat's poll() loop so things 310 like telnet can use it. 311 New functions getusername() and getgroupname() return a 312 char * given a uid/gid (and return a string representation of the number 313 if the lookup fails), and xgetpwnamid/xgetgrnamid were renamed to 314 xgetuid/xgetgid and now return an integer instead of a struct (also helping 315 handle lookup failures, you can still return the uid/get for "12345").</p> 316 317 <p>Switched atolx() to use long long internally. 318 Renamed xopen() to xopen_stdio() and made a new xopen() that never returns 319 stdin, stdout, or stderr (duping /dev/null into the filehandles as necessary). 320 New function xopenro() opens a file read only with one less argument, and 321 understands that "-" means stdin. New flag WARN_ONLY tells these functions 322 to just print a warning on failure, and return -1 instead of exiting. 323 Misc new functions like openro() which defaults to the WARN_ONLY behavior 324 and notstdio() which dup()s a filehandle up beyond stdin/out/err backfilling 325 with /dev/null as necessary. The WARN_ONLY flag let us remove the failok 326 argument from loopfiles().</p> 327 328 <p>New TOYFLAG_NOHELP disables --help processing (which "true" and "false" 329 should not do).</b> 330 331 <p>The test suite now has NOSPACE=1 to ignore whitespace (using diff -b to 332 check results), which helps TEST_HOST pass the same tests as toybox. 333 Fixes to chattr and date tests. It also has a new variable $C with the 334 absolute path to the command being tested (bypassing shell builtins), 335 and a function testcmd() which is just like testing() except it prepends 336 the command name ($C) to the test command line as well as the test 337 description.</p> 338 339 <a name="02-06-2016" /><a href="#02-06-2016"><hr><h2><b>June 2, 2016</b></h2></a> 340 <blockquote><p>When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but 341 highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic 342 analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental 343 signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's 344 brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows 345 quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of 346 liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.</p> 347 <p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 348 349 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.1</a> 350 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.1>git commit</a>) 351 is out. (Yes, I forgot to update the --version string, but I already 352 uploaded the <a href=downloads/binaries/0.7.1>binaries</a>.)</p> 353 354 <p>The website has https support now, you can "make cat ps ls" 355 to get standalone commands (and "make list list_pending" to see what's 356 available), and a whole lot of bugfixes and new options to existing 357 commands.</p> 358 359 <h2>New Commands</h2> 360 <p>Rob implemented <b>ulimit</b>. In pending, Elliott Hughes implemented 361 file. and Lipi Lee implemented a simple wget. (Pending also had minor 362 cleanups to more and lsof, but no promotions this time around.)</p> 363 364 <h2>New Options</h2> 365 <p>Izabera implemented env -u, suggested adding seq -w, made factor 366 use full unsigned 64 bit math even on 32 bit platforms, pointed out base64 367 -w0 should disable wrapping, and sped up wc -c. 368 Elliott Hughes added mount -o relatime, xxd -p -r, and od -w. 369 Sameer Pradhan (or possibly Bilal Qureshi) suggested adding stat -tL -c %m%t%T. 370 Tom Cherry added getprop -Z. Paul Barker added hostname -b and -F. 371 Rob added ls -b, made ls -q work with utf8, 372 made sed -f - read from stdin, and added top -O (like ps -O).</p> 373 374 <p>Elliott and Rob <b>added Thread support to ps and top</b>, 375 with -o TID, TNAME. We also added -o PCY (android scheduling policy), 376 -o BIT (process is 32 or 64 bit), and -o TNAME now shows the parent 377 command name for threads.</p> 378 379 <h2>Documentation</h2> 380 381 <p>Rob added the sed invocations to convert tabs/spaces and back to 382 design.html. Isaac Dunham updated hexedit's help text. 383 Jakob Flierl pointed out a broken URL in the README.</p> 384 385 <p>Rob also redid the naming scheme of sed's pattern manipulation code to 386 remove the gratuitous references to Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series, since it 387 was confusing people.</p> 388 389 <h2>Bugfixes</h2> 390 391 <p>Grep -H and -n should now work properly with -ABC. Andy Chu pointed out an 392 out of bounds access for zero length lines in rev, fixed a buffer overflow 393 in diff -r, and fixed operator precedence in expr (although Rob is rewriting 394 chunks of expr so toysh can use its plumbing for $(( )) ). 395 Patrick Ohly fixed the too-aggressive suid permission dropping logic. 396 Josh Gao fixed a segfault when find -iname got no argument, and 397 made tail -f work right with just one file argument. 398 Tom Marshall cleaned up tar's long filename support and improved 399 the tar tests, and reported another find bug (with -iname -o -iname not 400 tracking copy lifetimes properly) that got fixed.</p> 401 402 <p>Elliott Hughes fixed wc -c to not trust zero length files to actually be 403 zero length (/proc does that), fixed "mount -o rw,remount /system" on 404 Android, removed trailing spaces on ps -o cmdline, fixed pkill -9 and 405 the corresponding tests, made "insmod -" work, fixed top -b and tail -NUM, 406 pointed out that ps shouldn't trim numeric fields for display size limits, 407 and added some more 408 explicit "sort" calls to make pipelines so build tempfiles are easier to cache. 409 Rob <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/32b3587af261>fixed an insane sed thing</a> the perl 5.22 build was doing. 410 Fixed mount -o to properly pass in leftover string data, and 411 <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 412 to fix some bitrot in the kernel NFS driver's string parsing attached 413 to that message).</p> 414 415 <p>George Burgess IV corrected some variable types in traceroute. 416 Base64 now wraps == properly. Fixed two bzcat segfaults reported by 417 John Regehr. Andy Chu found a segfault in "sed -e 'c\'" with no trailing 418 line, and implemented mv -n and cp -n. The cyanogenmod guys pointed out that 419 cp -a shouldn't complain if a non-root user can't chown, and we added 420 the output path to cp -r error messages while we were there (before was just 421 the filename).</p> 422 423 <p>Samuel Holland fixed blkid's handling of vfat labels, and 424 fixed a segfault when basename was passed an empty string and an empty 425 suffix. Davis Mosenkovs fixed touch -t seconds parsing. 426 Rob fixed a bunzip bug reported by John Regehr (the bad CRC 427 error message was printing a NUL argument).</p> 428 429 <p>Not all of the commands build standalone, but more of them do now; 430 scripts/single.sh can now build a "mv" that isn't actually "cp". 431 The dependencies are more granualr, so "make top; make ps" no longer 432 produces a broken ps that ignores -A (because ps.o wasn't getting rebuilt 433 even though top had the FLAG macros for -A zeroed).</p> 434 435 <h2>Build</h2> 436 <p>Rob added a <b>warning when building commands out of 437 pending</b>. (The pending directory is full of code that hasn't been 438 properly vetted. Use at your own risk.)</p> 439 440 <p><b>New build targets let you build individual commands by name</b>, ala 441 "make ls cat ps", and you can run the test suite for each standalone 442 command with "make test_ls" and such. 443 "make list" shows all such standalone commands in defconfig, and 444 "make list_pending" shows unfinished commands from toys/pending 445 ("make list list_pending" shows both together). "make clean" now deletes 446 these filenames at the top level, and the corresponding unstripped files 447 live in the directory generated/unstripped.</p> 448 449 <p>Nicholas Boichat suggested switching make.sh to use $! for process 450 enumeration during parallel builds (which is both more efficient and more 451 portable), and suggested shell builtin replacements for wc/awk/sed so the 452 build loop has fewer forks now.</p> 453 454 <p>Lots of work on the test suite, much of it due to Andy Chu. It now 455 consistently prints the name of the command being tested at the start of each 456 test (and the common infrastructure does that, not each individual test), and 457 "make tests" actually runs all the available tests now. 458 Seperated pgrep and pkill tests, split lsattr/chattr, added fstype and base64 459 tests. The "tests/files" directory now collects files for tests to 460 use, with blkid, bzcat, and utf8 subdirectories: the $FILES variable 461 gives a path to it, so "$FILES/blkid/ext2.bz2" and so on. 462 The testsuite now has test files with 3 different types of "not utf8 output" 463 sequences that require escaping, plus some combining character torture 464 tests, direction reversals, and so on.</p> 465 466 <p>Added dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK to various pending commands that need 467 nommu conversion (which should fix the allyesconfig build).</p> 468 469 <p>Static builds with selinux should work again.</p> 470 471 <h2>Library</h2> 472 473 <p>New bufgetgrgid() and bufgetpwuid() functions cache previous lookup info 474 rather than repeatedly traversing /etc/passwd and /etc/group (which is slow). 475 Added xpipe() to lib to catch pipe creation failure. 476 The HELP_ macros generated by config2help.c now use a capital prefix 477 to avoid collicing with help_exit() and such.</p> 478 479 <p>The dirtree infrastructure got a cleanup pass in preparation for adding 480 infinite recursion depth support (needed by rm -r), updated the 481 <a href=code.html#ib_dirtree>documentation</a> to describe the new 482 semantics (removing dirtree_start() and adding dirtree_flagread()). 483 Now dirtree_recurse() takes the new dirfd as an argument.</p> 484 485 <p>Split out _xexit() from xexit() and let sigatexit() set multiple 486 callbacks.</p> 487 488 <p>For years the man pages have said to #include <sys/types.h> to get 489 major/minor/makedev but now that glibc 490 <a href=https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-11/msg00253.html>has vowed 491 to break existing programs</a> and replace it with another nonstandard header 492 not in posix or lsb, we added our own functions to lib/ to do the transform 493 ourselves (based on what the kernel actually expects).</p> 494 495 <h2>Portability</h2> 496 497 <p>Debian unstable started needing an extra header #include for some reason, and 498 although printf("%.*s", INT_MAX, s) worked fine on Ubuntu 12.04 it 499 didn't on 14.04, so added a workaround for that. Typecast a printf because 500 wchar_t isn't a rigidly defined size. RLIMIT_RTTIME was 501 added to the kernel in 2008 but you can't expect uClibc to have noticed yet, 502 nor did it #define MS_RELATIME (added in 2006), or prlimit (2010)... 503 (Given the improvements in musl and bionic, uClibc support may be dropped 504 in a future release.) Given that the xattr functions were added during 505 linux 2.5, we can #include its header unconditionally.</p> 506 507 <p>Renamed basename_r() to something else to avoid conflicting with freebsd's 508 libc, and both scripts/install.h and scripts/config2help.c no longer include 509 toys.h (to make cross-compiling from systems we don't run on easier).</p> 510 511 <p>Debian bug 635570 did something unspeakably nonportable, depending on 512 "sed -e 'a\'" (with no next line of the pattern, so an unterminated 513 continuation) to add a newline to the last line of input if and only if 514 that last line of the input didn't have a newline, and to take no other 515 action. This is well into "depending on a bug" territory, but we implemented 516 it because otherwise Debian's install broke. (Of course this behavior 517 is undocumented, non-obvious, and doesn't really make logical sense.)</p> 518 519 <p>CONFIG_TOYBOX_NORECURSE now disables the stack measuring logic (which 520 was giving some "security" code fits). Also we typecast pointers to (long) 521 before comparing them to avoid spurious compiler "optimizations" that 522 break the code.</p> 523 524 <a name="02-02-2016" /><a href="#02-02-2016"><hr><h2><b>February 2, 2016</b></h2></a> 525 <blockquote><p>"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that 526 quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with 527 you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." 528 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 529 530 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.0</a> 531 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.0>git commit</a>) 532 is out.</p> 533 534 <p>The new commands in defconfig are <b>iotop</b>, <b>top</b>, <b>pgrep</b>, 535 and <b>pkill</b> 536 (most replacing corresponding versions from pending). Added grep -ABC, 537 swapon -d (discard), mkswap -L (label) and UUID support, and find -delete. 538 Izabera added free -h and unshare -f. Josh Gao implemented tail -f. 539 Jose Bollo submitted cp --preserve=context,attr. Kylie McClain added 540 mktemp -u.</p> 541 542 <p>In pending there's the start of a vi command, and Sameer Pradhan contributed 543 a new dhcp6. This cycle saw several rounds of route cleanup and a little dhcp 544 cleanup, but neither are complete yet. Lipi Lee did some cleanup to netstat.c 545 and Elliott Hughes removed warnings from traceroute.</p> 546 547 <p>Lots of updates to ps: several new -o options, -k (--sort) -O and -M, 548 improved compatibility with Android's historical behavior, and 549 extensive internal code cleanup (including the removal of all 550 the magic constants).</p> 551 552 <h3><b>Website</b></h3> 553 554 <p>Dreamhost restored the <a href="#12-21-2015">missing 11 months</a> 555 to the mailing list archive, in the process deleting the month after 556 that. Now they've asked if I have mbox files archiving the new 557 gap (between December 20, 2015 to January 21, 2016, and presumably they 558 could also fill in the gap from December 14, 2014 to January 3, 2015 that's 559 been there since the last time they did this), 560 but due to some gmail filtering I've 561 <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2012.html#15-10-2012>never 562 been able to disable</a>, my copy of those files is spread among 3 different 563 mbox files I'd have to sort/filter/collate. (It's on the todo list.)</p> 564 565 <p>Added a code of conduct to the README (we're 566 <a href=https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/code-of-conduct>borrowing twitter's</a>) because somebody 567 made it necessary.</p> 568 569 <h3><b>Bugfixes</b></h3> 570 <p>Fixed another sed bug where any ] right after [ was skipped (not just the 571 first one in the range, so [[] didn't terminate). Fixed sort -f and added test cases. 572 Assume 80 columns in "ls -m | cat", ls -L is no longer backwards, 573 and ls of files with no paths no longer uses an uninitialized (zero) dirfd. 574 Several bugfixes 575 to find (Gilad Arnold fixed -perm, Daniel K. Levy fixed "find . -exec echo {}", 576 and while we're there I fixed find --prune, made "find . -execdir 577 echo {} + -execdir ls {} +" work, and ripped out the environment size 578 measuring code that checked for a 128k limit removed back in linux 2.6.22). 579 Elliott Hughes fixed the date command's parsing of 4 digit 580 years and documented the %s escape, fixed hwclock -u, and pointed out 581 that runcon needs to exec to do its job (not recursively call another 582 command_main() in the same process). Tom Marshall reported that blkid was 583 handling ext2 wrong. Mike Moreton corrected cpio extraction's uid and gid 584 values, and added a --no-preserve-owner option. Fixed the SUID permission 585 dropping logic (which was a bit over-zealous, preventing some commands from 586 running at all).</p> 587 588 <p>I'm told that debian-testing broke its libc so the nsenter build breaks, 589 but my attempts to install the debian-testing network cd image under 590 qemu keep breaking. Maybe someday they'll fix it enough I can actually 591 reproduce the problem. (Debootstrap under unbuntu builds an ubuntu-flavored 592 chroot in which toybox builds fine.)</p> 593 594 <h3><b>Documentation</b></h3> 595 <p>Rewrite of the about.html page, tweaks to design.html, and a re-triage of 596 sbase in roadmap.html. Update to mkstatus.py to collate multiple span 597 tags with the same id, resulting in a larger status.html page (which 598 was previously ignoring some commands in the roadmap).</p> 599 600 <p>Expanded the defconfig/allyesconfig/allnoconfighelp text in "make help" 601 to explain what they're for.</p> 602 603 <h3><b>infrastructure</b></h3> 604 <ul> 605 <li><p>Expanded toys.optargs to 64 bits so a command can have more than 32 options.</p></li> 606 <li><p>Added NOEXIT() wrapper to turn xwrap() functions into warning versions 607 using the existing longjump(toys.rebound) infrastructure.</p></li> 608 <li><p>Renamed dirtree->data to dirfd and stopped storing symlink length 609 into it (this fixed a bug where following symlinks to directories 610 didn't give a valid directory filehandle, noticeable with ls -Z).</p></li> 611 <li><p>New TAGGED_ARRAY() infrastructure generates index and bitmask macros 612 for arrays of structures starting with a name string.</p></li> 613 <li><p>New lib/linestack.c for utf8 fontmetrics (draw_str() and utf8len() 614 and so on), and for tracking multiple lines of text 615 (vi, less, shell history) that need wordwrapping and scrolling up/down.</p></li> 616 <li><p>Upgrades to lib/interestingtimes.c: scan_key() now has a timeout 617 in miliseconds and recognizes more sequences including ANSI 618 window size probes. New utf8 test files in tests/files/utf8 including 619 sequence reversing, stacked combining chars, and all three types of 620 unprintable sequences (low ascii <32 ala ^X, invalid utf8 sequences ala 621 <AB><CD>, and invalid unicode code points ala U+1234).</p></li> 622 <li><p>More comma handling code in lib.c: comma_args()</p></li> 623 <li><p>Added error_msg_raw() to shut up fortify's endless static checking false 624 positives.</p></li> 625 <li><p>readfileat() can now realloc() in a loop to read long files 626 ("zcat | insmod" needed it).</p></li> 627 </ul> 628 629 <h3><b>Roadmap</b></h3> 630 <p>We're getting close to having a self-hosting development environment 631 using toybox for the command line. The remaining busybox commands in 632 <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>Aboriginal Linux</a> are:</p> 633 634 <blockquote><p><b> 635 awk bunzip2 bzcat bzip2 dd diff expr fdisk ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip gzip 636 less ping route sh sha512sum tar test tr unxz vi wget xzcat zcat 637 </b></p></blockquote> 638 639 <p>And the remaining non-busybox commands in Aboriginal Linux's build/host 640 directory (from the distcc, genext2fs, e2fsprogs, zlib, and squashfs packagesi) 641 are:</p> 642 643 <blockquote><p><b> 644 mke2fs fsck.ext2 resize2fs distcc genext2fs unsquashfs distccd mksquashfs tune2fs 645 </b></p></blockquote> 646 647 <p>Squashfs and distcc are probably out of scope for toybox, but mke2fs, 648 fsck.ext2, resize2fs, genext2fs, and tune2fs should all be added to the 649 above "busybox" replacement list.</p> 650 651 <p>Remind me to include this countdown in future releases. Once they've all 652 been replaced, the next goal is <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>building AOSP under itself</a>.</p> 653 654 <p>See the full <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> and <a href=status.html>status</a> 655 pages for more details.</p> 656 657 <a name="12-21-2015" /><a href="#12-21-2015"><hr><h2><b>December 21, 2015</b></h2></a> 658 659 <p>Yes, 11 months have gone missing from the mailing list web archive.</p> 660 661 <p>Yesterday evening Dreamhost's mailman server went down (timing out trying 662 to connect). I poked them about it, they 663 <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/678781271670149121>blamed 664 DNS</a>, I explained that the hang was _after_ the DNS lookup and 665 entered the dig info into the trouble ticket showing the IPs the DNS 666 queries were returning, they reinstalled the server at that IP from what I 667 assume was their most recent backup, and that's how 11 months of messages 668 vanished out of the archive.</p> 669 670 <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 671 can do. <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>Last time</a> 672 this sort of thing <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>happened</a> 673 we went back and forth for months, so I added a link to a backup web 674 archive (in the nav bar on the left) that isn't controlled by dreamhost, 675 and thus doesn't gratuitously lose data on a regular basis. (I note 676 the earlier hole in Dreamhost's archive was never fixed either. That 677 was data never getting archived, this is a year's worth of data that 678 was in the archive until yesterday vanishing after the fact.)</p> 679 680 <p>If you're wondering why the <a href=http://lists.landley.net>top level</a> 681 list page has been "temporarily disabled" for multiple years now... you'd have 682 to ask Dreamhost. I know I have. More than a dozen times.</p> 683 684 <a name="03-11-2015" /><a href="#03-11-2015"><hr><h2><b>November 3, 2015</b></h2></a> 685 <blockquote><p>"Alright," said Ford. "How would you react if I said that I'm 686 not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity 687 of Betelgeuse?" Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way. "I don't know," he 688 said, taking a pull of beer. "Why - do you think it's the sort of thing you're 689 likely to say?" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 690 691 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.1</a> 692 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.1>git commit</a>) 693 is out.</p> 694 695 <p>We have a new <b>ps</b> command with all the -o fields posix wants (although 696 it doesn't accept BSD non-dash option syntax yet), and <b>bunzip2</b> (not just 697 bzcat but the proper extract-in-place command). 698 Sameer Pradhan added <b>hostid</b> and <b>fsync</b>. 699 Elliott Hughes added <b>flock</b>. 700 701 <p>The people waiting for <b>human readable number support</b> (du -hH, ls -h, 702 and so on) can thank Elliott Hughes for implementing it. (Our output doesn't 703 exactly match others' because we our "binary" mode will say 1.0G instead of 704 1024M, which is a bug in the other one we didn't emulate.)</p> 705 706 <p>The other big news is <b>nommu support</b>, tested on the new 707 <a href=http://nommu.org/jcore>jcore</a> processor but presumaby working 708 on any nommu system. A few commands don't support nommu yet, but those 709 are disabled by dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK in menuconfig when building 710 for nommu. The roadmap now has a large section analyzing the uClinux 711 project (note that <a href=http://nommu.org>nommu.org</a> is slowly replacing 712 <a href=http://uclinux.org>uclinux.org</a> as the standard repository of 713 all knowledge and wisdom about nommu. The old site <a href=#12-02-2012>contains 714 much that is apocryphal</a>, or at least wildly inaccurate, and the new one 715 is trying to improve on that).</p> 716 717 <p>Both "make change" and scripts/single.sh (for building standalone commands 718 without the multiplexer logic) now use the top level .config 719 for toybox global settings such as Linux Security Blanket Module selection, 720 (so make defconfig before change now).</p> 721 722 <p>Documentation updates to the <a href=code.html>code</a> and 723 <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> pages.</p> 724 725 <h3>pending</h3> 726 727 <p>In the pending directory Sameer Pradhan added tftp, 728 and Elliott Hughes sent lsof. Isaac Dunham upgraded mdev, 729 reboot, init, login, and modprobe, and fixed a distro-specific build break in 730 scripts/mkflags.h. Elliott Hughes and Lipi Lee made netstat -p handle 731 command lines longer than 21 characters, and Elliott fixed netstat -e and 732 some build warnings. Yeongdeok Suh fixed a warning in dhcpd. 733 I started cleanup on pgrep/pkill.</p> 734 735 <h3>Command updates, bugfixes, and infrastructure</h3> 736 737 <p>The multiplexer's "command not found" error exit is now 127, so now you can't 738 distinguish between a command not being found in the multiplexer and 739 the multiplexer itself not being found by the shell, because people wanted 740 that for some reason.</p> 741 742 <p>Elliott Hughes made date reject invalid dates rather 743 than set the clock to something weird (setting the clock 100 years into the 744 future makes most Linux desktops surprisingly unhappy, and ntpdate won't fix it 745 either), fixed several ls -l display issues (user/group field ordering, 746 make user/group/lsmcontext left aligned), did the aforementioned 747 extensive work on human readable number output, fixed ionice's default 748 class, fixed a mv overwrite bug, made df's columns auto-size, added 749 --ppid and -Z to ps, and teamed up with Daniel K. Levy to fix 750 a segfault in find's handling of -newer -group or -user.</p> 751 752 <p>Hyejin Kim added stat -c %T support. Colin Cross worked 753 on vmstat fixing 754 a header printing bug and calculating the bi and bo columns in the right 755 units. Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra 756 newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed. 757 Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain 758 pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax. 759 Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows 760 all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p> 761 762 <p>Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra 763 newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed. 764 Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain 765 pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax. 766 Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows 767 all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p> 768 769 <p>Two large thinko fixes in oneit: -3 was always enabled (which would 770 eventually block if the child never read the exiting PID numbers from its file 771 descriptor #3 until the pipe filled up), and the signal handlers weren't 772 set up right (for requesting semi-graceful halt/poweroff/reboot). 773 Calling install without a mode is now 0755, and install -g 0 no longer clashes 774 with cp --preserve. Better error message for ls -r on unreadable 775 directories, and ls -Z now uses O_PATH (with the /proc/self/fd/%d 776 workaround for kernel stupidity as necessary).</p> 777 778 <p>Date now understands @unixtime[.fraction] and uses -D for 779 the set-side format (matching busybox's extension for this). The seq -f 780 string now checks that it's got exactly one %f escape with the correct 781 attributes (and a whole bunch of test cases for it). Fixed a bug 782 in od that screwed up the position indicator on arm and mips. 783 In stat the d/h units moved from %d %D to the default string. 784 And patch can now correctly apply hunks with trailing context to the start of 785 the file.</p> 786 787 <p>The prompt argument moved out of yesno() (the caller can print the prompt 788 themselves). Replaced toys.exithelp with help_exit(). Added new 789 XVFORK() macro, and xpopen_both() calls /proc/self/exe when passed 790 a NULL argv (see cpio -p for example usage). Replaced toys.recurse 791 with toys.stacktop so the recurse or re-exec decision is now based 792 on bytes of stack space used. Marked a bunch of command-local functions 793 static.</p> 794 795 <p>New additions to lib/ include strlower(), xconnect(), and the 796 aforementioned help_exit(). 797 The testsuite now has some infrastructure tests based on "example" 798 commands such as toys/examples/test_human_readable.c. 799 The login command finally got a long-overdue cleanup (it's one of the 800 commands that predate the "pending" directory but were part of the reason 801 for it). Hexedit had an 802 uninitialized variable (of course gcc didn't spot it, it was too busy 803 warning about "may be used uninitialized but never actually is" variables).</p> 804 805 <p>Tweaked makefile so 806 "make CROSS_COMPILE=prefix-" (as well as "CROSS_COMPILE=prefix- make", 807 which still works). Toybox is now installed chmod -w so broken installers 808 (like the bunzip2 package's) that try to overwrite existing binaries won't 809 knock out the whole of toybox. 810 GCC 5.2.0 stopped being able to compile Linux 2.6.12's kconfig, but 811 we added a workaround. You can now build uptime without utmpx.h. 812 Alejandro Joya pointed out that enabling smack required smack on the host 813 as well as target when cross compiling, which is now fixed.</p> 814 815 <p>Note: toybox can autodetect nommu support when building with a uClibc 816 toolchain 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>, 817 but <a href=http://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>with musl-libc</a> 818 you'll have to enable CONFIG_TOYBOX_MUSL_NOMMU_IS_BROKEN to work around the 819 fact they provide a non-functional fork() implementation that always returns 820 -ENOSYS, to prevent you from compile-time probing for nommu support when 821 cross-compiling. Unfortunately "preventing you from probing" seems to be 822 an explicit policy with musl, they also don't provide an "#ifdef __MUSL__" 823 because their library is perfect and you're only ever allowed to work around 824 other people's bugs, not theirs. So we have to use menuconfig to manually 825 enable musl-specific bug workarounds.</p> 826 827 <a name="23-07-2015" /><a href="#23-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2015</b></h2></a> 828 <p>I recreated the <a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>0.6.0 source tarball</a> 829 (new sha1sum 08fb1c23f520c25a15f262a8a95ea5b676a98d54) 830 because I forgot to add --prefix to the git archive command when I updated 831 my release script from mercurial, so the files weren't in an enclosing 832 directory. (Ooops.)</p> 833 834 <a name="19-07-2015" /><a href="#19-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 19, 2015</b></h2></a> 835 <blockquote><p> 836 The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic 837 component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar 838 hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it 839 around in." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy </p></blockquote> 840 841 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.0</a> 842 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.0>git commit</a>) 843 is out. (Yes, git. See the <a href=#05-04-2015>previous news entry</a>.)</p> 844 845 <p>Sorry for the unusually long gap between releases. Since last release Ye 846 Olde Project Maintainer traveled to japan twice and had two more "once 847 a century" floods at home. (Probably a coincidence.) Still catching up.</p> 848 849 <h3><b>CELF/ELC talk and Wikipedia[citation needed] article</b></h3> 850 851 <p>I gave another State Of The Toybox talk 852 (<a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04XwAbtPmAg>video</a> 853 <a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2015.txt>outline</a>), in which I 854 repeat my <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#07-11-2013>perennial</a> 855 <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/557309224535851009>complaint</a> 856 that Wikipedia[citation needed] 857 <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox>still</a> 858 <a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#Controversy_over_Toybox>says</a> 859 toybox was relicensed before its hiatus, when relicensing was why 860 the hiatus ended.</p> 861 862 <p>Since Wikipedia[citation needed] seems unable to do the 863 <a href=#15-11-2011>most</a> 864 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/log/tip/LICENSE>basic</a> 865 <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011>research</a> on 866 this point, and has stuck to an incorrect sequence of events for years, 867 I've been gradually escalating my attempts to correct them. Toybox 868 came out of mothballs in November 2011 <b>because</b> it could be 869 relicensed. That's what opened up a new niche busybox wasn't already 870 filling with a 10 year headstart.</p> 871 872 <a name="asterisk_back" /> 873 <p>The article has plenty of smaller issues<a href=#asterisk>*</a>, but 874 given that I gave an entire talk at Ohio LinuxFest in 2013 875 (<a href=http://landley.net/talks/ohio-2013.txt>outline</a>, 876 <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 877 my projects, that one bugs me.</p> 878 879 <h3><b>New stuff this release</b></h3> 880 881 <p>There's a new android menu in menuconfig, and rather a lot of Linux 882 Security Module support (Smack for Tizen from Xavier Roche and Jos Bollo, 883 and SELinux for Android from Elliott Hughes; see 884 the Security Blanket menu under global settings in menuconfig) has 885 trickled in, although there's still more to come.</p> 886 887 <p><b>New commands:</b> Added reset, nproc, ionice, and iorenice. 888 Elliott Hughes contributed xxd, runcon, 889 restorecon, load_policy, getenforce, setenforce, getprop, and setprop. 890 Promoted shred, nsenter, and hwclock.</p> 891 892 <p>You can once again build catv now the flag infrastructure's been updated to 893 let it coexist with cat -v. 894 And on a long plane flight I wrote 895 hexedit, an interactive hex editor that implements the start of 896 cursor control infrastructure (for eventual use by less and vi and shell 897 command history and so on).</p> 898 899 <p><b>New options:</b> Added sed -E as a BSD-compatible synonym for -r. 900 Upgraded oneit with -r (restart), -3 (send exiting PID values to child), 901 and signal handling. Added -v option to timeout, -m to mknod, -u to shred, 902 -t to dmesg, and -123 to head and tail. Added implicit "." to grep -r without 903 any files to work on. Hyejin Kim requested prefix support for truncate -s. 904 Greg Hackman added -inum to find. 905 Jan Cybulski added the smack side of ls -Z support. Various patches also 906 added -Z to mkdir, mknod, and mkfifo. 907 Basic cp --preserve support went in, but not yet the xattr/LSM parts.</p> 908 909 <p>The toybox command now has a --version option, 910 which uses "git describe" if available.</p> 911 912 <p><b>Build infrastructure:</b> 913 The "make change" target now saves the output of each failed standalone 914 command build in a .bad file, and "make defconfig" is quieter now.</p> 915 916 <p>Paul Barker submitted a large patch changing command install paths so 917 "toybox can be installed alongside busybox without confusing 918 update-alternatives". (There's some argument over 919 what the right paths should be, and I'm waiting for 920 people to tell me what else needs fixing because I have no idea. I've 921 been symlinking /bin to /usr/bin since 2002 922 <a href=http://landley.net/writing/hackermonthly-issue022-pg33.pdf>for 923 historical reasons</a>.)</p> 924 925 <p><b>Docs:</b> The repository link now goes to github, with another link 926 to the commit rss feed.</p> 927 928 <p>Elliott Hughes updated the Android section of the roadmap 929 (and he would know). Redid bits of scripts/mkstatus.py to make updating 930 status.html easier, and the README is larger.</p> 931 932 <p>More description of option parsing in code.html, which now describes the 933 FLAG_x macros, switching flag macro sets with FOR_newcommand, how 934 configuration zeroes flag macros and using FORCE_FLAGS to suppress the 935 zeroing of options shared between commands. Also added description of ";" 936 to make --longopts take an optional =value part, and more about TOYBOX_DEBUG 937 to check NEWTOY() option strings (otherwise a bad option string makes 938 lib/args.c obviously segfault, but doesn't explain why).</p> 939 940 <p>Added a "Why 0BSD?" section to license.html when submitting zero clause bsd 941 to SPDX (according to the pending license spreadsheet, it's been approved for 942 SPDX 2.2).</p> 943 944 <p>The old list of commands needing cleanup but not in pending was 945 removed from toys/pending/README and instead the issues were added 946 as TODO comments in the individual commands.</p> 947 948 <p><b>Bugfixes:</b> 949 Fixed mount -a segfaulting without -O (reported by Janus Troelsen), 950 and made it try a "become rw" ioctl() on the block device before falling 951 back to mounting read only (because Android expects that). 952 Fixed printf -- and printf ---. Lots of tweaks to ls -l spacing with 953 different options. Make touch -d and -t actually set time when you don't 954 specify nanoseconds. 955 Fixed a subtle bug where recursive calls (toybox commands that run other 956 toybox commands) weren't resetting all their state. (This manifested as 957 a "no }" error from "find | xargs sed", but could cause other problems.) 958 And David Halls reported another sed bug trying to compile libiconv (which 959 left extra \ at the start of lines in a generated shell script, breaking 960 the build). Output an error message for "cat /mnt".</p> 961 962 <p>Kylie McClain reported that mktemp broke when $TMPDIR was set to an empty 963 string (which is not the same as unset), that install/find didn't support 964 numeric uid/gids, and that sort -z affects both input and output. 965 Isabella Parakiss fixed a printf.c bug. 966 David Halls fixed bugs in install -D and find -exec. Samuel Holland 967 fixed unshare -r. Hyejin Kim fixed makedevs with a count of 1, fold -w 968 range checking, an error path in scripts/mkflags.c, added -i to dhcpd, 969 and stopped su from prompting the root user for the new user's password. 970 Jan Cybulski spotted wrong indentation when combining ls -s and -i with -C and 971 -x. Jos Bollo fixed stat %G. Sameer Pradhan fixed a bug in mkfifo -Z.</p> 972 973 <p>Elliott Hughes asked for a default SIGPIPE handler to disable 974 the signal handler bionic's dynamic loader installs (yes really). Still not 975 100% sure what the correct behavior is there. (Posix is 976 (<a href=http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.standards.posix.austin.general/10915>actively unhelpful</a>, but at least they're taking 977 <a href=http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=789#c1976>years to 978 make up their mind</a>. Elliott also sent patches to fix a typo in 979 useradd.test, add missing arguments to error_exit() calls and clean up 980 printf() format strings, fix an off by one error in human_readable(), 981 fix dmesg -c error reporting, fix a segfault in comma_scan where the option 982 was the last item in optlist (triggered by mount -o ro,remount), fix 983 hwclock -w, made ifconfig print lowercase MAC addresses (it was bothering 984 him), and make terminal_size() read the right environment variable 985 (LINES, not ROWS). And he suggested the test suite notice high command exit 986 values (corresponding to segfault or other signals).</p> 987 988 <p>People are apparently using toys/pending commands, despite the police tape 989 and flashing lights, so added louder warnings to toys/pending/README. 990 Elliott Hughes fixed various problems with tar, dd, more, and top. 991 Hyejin Kim cleaned up syslogd and dumpleases. Isaac Dunham added hotplug 992 support to mdev. Yeongdeok Suh added RFC-3315 ipv6 support to dhcpd.</p> 993 994 <p>I rewrote ps.c from scratch (in pending), but it's not ready for real use 995 yet.</p> 996 997 <p><b>Portability:</b> 998 On the portability front Bernhard Rosenkranzer fixed a problem where the 999 menuconfig code wouldn't compile in C99 mode. (This led to me documenting 1000 the craptacular nature of kconfig in a README, and the plan to replace it 1001 sometime before 1.0.) Some extra flags to shut up overzealous llvm warnings 1002 were added (and have to be probed for because gcc complains about 1003 arguments it doesn't recognize even when they switch stuff _off_ using 1004 a standard syntax). Don't depend on malloc(0) to return non-null in ls. 1005 David Halls fixed some mac/ios portability issues, 1006 implying somebody's built at least part of toybox on a mac.</p> 1007 1008 <p>Added basename_r() to lib/lib.c because the posix semantics for basename() 1009 are stupid but what the gnu guys did to it was appalling. 1010 Turns out bionic already had a basename_r(), but posix still doesn't. 1011 Fixed it up in portability.h, but this 1012 could break more stuff in future. (Correct fix is to lobby posix to add it, 1013 which would probably take about 15 years...)</p> 1014 1015 <p><b>Infrastructure:</b> 1016 The build now checks $LDFLAGS for linker-only flags, and allows the strip 1017 command to fail (binflt toolchains provide a strip that doesn't work). 1018 Since time.c uses floating point, added TOYBOX_FLOAT dependency in config.</p> 1019 1020 <p>There's a lib/lsm.h defining varous inline functions for linux 1021 security modules stuff, if (lsm_enabled()) should turn into a compile-time 1022 constant 0 and let code drop out when TOYBOX_LSM_NONE selected, but 1023 testing against CFG_TOYBOX_LSM_NONE or derived symbols is still useful 1024 becuase when it _is_ enabled the probe turns into a system call you 1025 don't want to repeat too much.</p> 1026 1027 <p>Switched a bunch of commands from signal() to xsignal(). Factored out 1028 xgetgrnamid() and xgetpwnamid() into xwrap.c. Make time.c depend on 1029 TOYBOX_FLOAT (since it always uses float so shouldn't be available on 1030 build targets without even software float). Added readfileat() to lib/lib.c.</p> 1031 1032 <p>The dirtree infrastructure now passes in full flags for the old symlink 1033 field, and the new DIRTREE_SHUTUP flag disables warnings if a file vanishes 1034 out from under you during traverse. New dirtree_start() wrapper to 1035 create dirtree root with only two arguments.</p> 1036 1037 <p>The not-curses infrastructure introduced by hexedit mostly moved to 1038 lib/interestingtimes.c.</p> 1039 1040 <a name="asterisk" /> 1041 <a href="#asterisk_back" />Asterisk:</a> such when 1042 Tim contacted me (my blog says a couple days before nov 13, 2011, I.E. 1043 11/11/11 not some specific day 2 months later) to ask if I wanted to work 1044 on a new project he was proposing called 1045 <a href=http://www.elinux.org/Busybox_replacement_project>BentoBox</a> 1046 (because I used to do busybox, he'd forgotten toybox existed 1047 until I brought it up). And don't ask me what "focuses not on compatibility 1048 with its GNU counterparts" means when CP_MORE adds 7 non-posix options 1049 and toys/other has 84 commands in neither posix nor LSB. I think they're 1050 struggling to explain the difference having dismissed "licensing" as being 1051 the reason it started up again after a long hiatus? The reason I don't think 1052 GNU is special is there are a half-dozen other independent 1053 implementations of the same unix command tools out there (AT&T, 1054 BSD, Coherent, Minix, plan 9, busybox, toybox, and several more analyzed in 1055 the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a>, and that's ignoring the implementations 1056 written for DOS or in assembly over the years). But I do care what 1057 Linux From Scratch expects, and if it's 1058 <a href=http://archive.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-museum/7.6/LFS-BOOK-7.6-NOCHUNKS.html#ch-tools-gcc-pass1>calling mv -v</a> 1059 then I impelement mv -v 1060 even if <a href=http://landley.net/toybox/roadmap.html>posix hasn't got 1061 it</a>. And I don't know why "gnu counterparts" would describe this when 1062 util-linux isn't a gnu package, nor are info-zip, e2fsprogs, kmod, less, 1063 procps, shadow, sysklogd, vim, zlib, sudo, dhcpcd...</p> 1064 1065 <a name="05-04-2015" /><a href="#05-04-2015"><hr><h2><b>April 5, 2015</b></h2></a> 1066 <p>Since <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox/>android</a> and 1067 <a href=https://git.tizen.org/cgit/platform/upstream/toybox.git>tizen</a> 1068 and <a href=https://github.com/kraj/meta-musl/tree/master/recipes-core/toybox>openembedded</a> 1069 and <a href=https://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/toybox>gentoo</a> 1070 and so on have all been using Georgi Chorbadzhiyski's git mirror rather 1071 than the mercurial repository, I bit the bullet and switched the project's repo 1072 <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox>to git</a>. Georgi's 1073 <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>mirror</a> is now pulling from that.</p> 1074 1075 <a name="25-02-2015" /><a href="#25-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 25, 2015</b></h2></a> 1076 <blockquote><p>"A common mistake that people make when trying to design 1077 something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of 1078 complete fools."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1079 1080 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.5.2</a> 1081 (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1702>commit 1702</a>) is out.</p> 1082 1083 <p>New promoted commands: sed (finally fixed enough it builds Linux From 1084 Scratch), printf (cleaned up and promoted), shred and 1085 base64 (the Tizen guys wanted them), getenforce, setenforce, and chcon (android), 1086 mix (promoted with fixes from Isaac Dunham), nsenter (from 1087 Andy Lutomirski, merged into unshare).</p> 1088 1089 <p>Elliott Hughes submited a bunch of patches to support Android (to 1090 both toybox and Bionic libc, which he maintains). On toybox's end this 1091 involved a lot of fixups to portability.[ch] and fixes to over a dozen 1092 commands, plus several new ones. Other portability fixes included working 1093 with buildroot's uclibc fork and building for nommu targets.</p> 1094 1095 <p>The new "make change" target builds each toybox command as a standalone 1096 binary. Rather a lot of commands that didn't build by themselves (mv depending 1097 on cp and so on) were hit with a large rock until they built standalone. 1098 This involved rewriting bits of option parsing, more elaborate dependency 1099 generation, making each command have its own config 1100 symbol and main() function (even when it's just a wrapper calling another 1101 command's main()), and so on. Also, some commands can't be built standalone 1102 at a conceptual level: "help" describes other enabled commands and "sh" 1103 has a number of bulitin commands (cd, exit, set) that require the 1104 multiplexer infrastructure, so "make change" filters them out.</p> 1105 1106 <p>The mailing list's web archive is still screwed up. Dreamhost has 1107 been trying to fix it since approximately September. There are 1108 <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>two</a> 1109 <a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>other</a> less broken 1110 archives, but neither has quite the same UI as mailman.</p> 1111 1112 <h3>Bugfixes and tweaks</h3> 1113 1114 <p>Cynt Rynt sent in tests for ifconfig, 1115 Robert Thompson taught factor to accept whitespace separated arguments, 1116 Hyejin Kim pointed out that some of mktemp's longopts were attached to 1117 the wrong short options, 1118 Luis Felipe Strano Moraes fixed a wrong free() call in bootchartd in pending. 1119 Patches from Ashwini Sharma to make "df /dev/node" work, prevent du from 1120 looping endlessly following symlinks, and to make expr.c 1121 (in pending) understand == and regex matches. (Speaking of expr, it gets 1122 priority groupings wrong but the bug was actually in the posix spec's 1123 HTML conversion. They fixed the posix spec upstream for us. Still need 1124 to fix the expr code, but it's in pending for a reason...)</p> 1125 1126 <p>Some commands grew new option flags, such as cp --remove-destination 1127 and touch -h.</p> 1128 1129 <p>The parallel build has better error reporting now. When toybox needs to 1130 re-exec itself to regain suid root permissions and hasn't got the suid bit, 1131 it now gives the right error message ("not root" instead of "no such command"). 1132 1133 <p>Added a test to "mount" to not mount the same device/directory combination 1134 over itself (the OS catches this for block devices, but not for tmpfs). 1135 Make blkid distinguish ext3 from ext4. Added catv back into cat (because 1136 the Android guys wanted it, and they have historical usage on their side, 1137 so...). Handle nanoseconds in touch.</p> 1138 1139 <p>Fixed a segfault when CP_MORE was disabled (the resulting option flag list 1140 no longer defined -d but still had it in option groups at the end). 1141 Workaround for glibc redefining dirname() and basename() to random non-posix 1142 semantics because gnu. (They could have created dirname_r() but didn't want 1143 to.)</p> 1144 1145 <p>Fix an ifconfig test that was preventing assigning an ipv4 address to 1146 interface aliases. Several cleanup passes on hwclock but not quite 1147 promoted out of pending yet.<p> 1148 1149 <p>Fixed a wrong error message in rm (if you had a chmod 000 directory and 1150 did rm -r on it without -f, after the prompt it would complain it was a 1151 directory, which was not the problem).</p> 1152 1153 <p>The gzip compression code now does "store only" output to stdout, for 1154 what that's worth.</p> 1155 1156 <p>Cleanup mountpoint and expand, and remove them from toys/pending/README 1157 (a list of commands that predate the toys/pending directory but needed 1158 another pass).</p> 1159 1160 <h3>Library and infrastructure:</h3> 1161 1162 <p>Reworked the option parsing infrastructure so more commands build 1163 standalone (via scripts/single.sh or "make change"). The option flag bit 1164 values are no longer packed, it leaves spaces where currently disabled 1165 flags go, and you can #define FORCE_FLAGS so disabled flags aren't zeroed. 1166 This allows multiple commands to more easily share infrastructure, even if 1167 your current flag context is for a disabled command (switched off in config), 1168 you can force them to stay on and as long as the flags read the same right 1169 to left they'll have the same values.</p> 1170 1171 <p>We've started removing use of strncpy() because it's a hugely broken 1172 standard C function: the length is the maximum length to _append_, not 1173 the size of the destination buffer. It memsets the remaining space it didn't 1174 copy ala "memset(dest+strlen(dest), 0, len);" so 1175 if you think len is the size of dest you're guaranteed to stomp memory off the 1176 end). And if it runs out of space it won't null terminate because reasons. 1177 (Meanwhile sprintf("%*s", len, str) is counting wide characters in your current 1178 locale, so if you set a locale other than "C" it will also go past your 1179 allocated buffer size. Whoever is maintining the C library standards is really 1180 bad at strings.) 1181 Instead we have xstrncat() which will error_exit() if src+dest+1 doesn't 1182 fit in the buffer. (Because randomly truncating input data isn't necessarily 1183 an improvement.) And there's always xmprintf().</p> 1184 1185 <p>Similarly, strtol() doesn't return an error indicator on overflow, 1186 you have to clear and then check errno. So new xstrtol() that cares 1187 about overflow.</p> 1188 1189 <p>The bionic and musl guys agree faccessat(AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) is not 1190 supported, so stop using it.</p> 1191 1192 <p>Fixed toy_exec() to detect when argc is in optargs, so we don't 1193 need a separate xexec_optargs().</p> 1194 1195 <a name="18-02-2015" /><a href="#18-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 18, 2015</b></h2></a> 1196 <p>Dreamhost continues to be unable to make mailing list archives work, so 1197 here's <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>another 1198 list archive</a> with a less awkward interface than gmane.</p> 1199 1200 <p>(Neither gives you the convenient historical monthly views of mailman, 1201 but I still have hopes dreamhost will someday figure out what they're doing 1202 wrong. They've only been trying since October. Last month they did a 1203 <a href=http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2015/01/14/discussion-list-hardware-maintenance/>hardware upgrade to fix a software problem</a>, and the stale 1204 data loads much faster now, so that's something.)</p> 1205 1206 <p>Update (Feb 19): the archive started updating again, by discarding 1207 all the pending data. So there are now _two_ giant holes in Dreamhost's 1208 web archive, from Dec 15-Jan 3, and then another hole from Jan 16-Feb 18. 1209 The relevant messages are in both of the other archives. Here's hoping 1210 the chronic archive constipation problem won't happen a sixth time.</p> 1211 1212 <a name="30-12-2014" /><a href="#30-12-2014"><hr><h2><b>December 30, 2014</b></h2></a> 1213 <p>Due to Dreamhost's <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>ongoing</a> 1214 <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>inability</a> to make mailman 1215 work reliably, I've added a link to a backup web archive at 1216 <a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>gmane</a> to the nav bar 1217 on the left.</p> 1218 1219 <p>You still subscribe to the list through 1220 <a href=http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net>the first link</a>.</p> 1221 1222 <p>Update (January 27, 2015): they're <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/558428839462703104>still working on it</a>.</p> 1223 1224 <a name="19-11-2014" /><a href="#19-11-2014"><hr><h2><b>November 19, 2014</b></h2></a> 1225 1226 <blockquote><p>"This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1227 1228 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.1</a> 1229 (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1566>commit 1566</a>) is out.</p> 1230 1231 <p>It's an interim release, mostly bugfixes. There are several new commands, 1232 but they're all in pending.</p> 1233 1234 <h3>Development</h3> 1235 1236 <p>Finally implemented sed, which is still in pending because although 1237 it's feature complete according to posix, and even passes the parts of 1238 Busybox's sed test suite that aren't explicitly testing for gnu bugs we 1239 don't want to copy, it's not yet good enough to build Linux From Scratch. 1240 (The ./configure stages use very long sed scripts. 20 commits worth of 1241 implementation and debugging, just under 1000 lines of code, and there's 1242 still more to do. We're definitely up to some of the "fiddly" commands now. 1243 Did you know "echo hello | sed p - -" segfaults gnu sed in Ubuntu 12.04? 1244 Yeah...)</p> 1245 1246 <p>Talked with the Tizen developers to follow up on their desire to 1247 make toybox a part of the base Tizen system, and got a list of commands 1248 to add to the roadmap. The tizen todo list is:</p> 1249 1250 <blockquote><p> 1251 wget, sha256*, gzip, gunzip, bunzip2, rsync, zdiff*, 1252 less, ar, arch, base64, csplit, dir, fmt, join, 1253 nproc, shred, shuf, stdbuf, stty, test, tr, unexpand, 1254 users, vdir, diff3, sdiff, dosfsck (fsck.vfat), awk, fdisk 1255 </p></blockquote> 1256 1257 <p>(Most of which was already on the todo list, but it helps prioritize.)</p> 1258 1259 <p>Fixed md5sum and sha1sum on big endian systems (reported by James McMechan). 1260 Andy Lutomirski fixed unshare's help text and option parsing, 1261 and submitted nsenter (a tool to use setns(2)) to pending. 1262 Isaac Dunham implemented acpi -ctV options, and spotted the bug that ls -d 1263 was inappropraitely following command line symlinks without -H or -L (it 1264 should act like ls -l does), and ls -F handles symlinks wrong too. 1265 Lukasz Szpakowski sent in two bugfixes to tail.c. Cynt Rynt spotted an 1266 unnecessary assignment in lib/password.c.</p> 1267 1268 <p>Ashwini Sharma's team was as busy as usual, submitting tr, crontab, and 1269 ipcrm, and hwclock to pending, more features to the pending ip.c, and a 1270 pile of bugfixes (to chgrp, killall, ifconfig, insmod, 1271 losetup, comm, cp, id, xwrap, netcat, modprobe, nohup...) mostly found by 1272 static analysis. (These fixes are mostly to seldom-used codepaths like the 1273 TOYBOX_FREE config option, but test coverage is always appreciated.) Ashwini 1274 also suggested upgrading ln -f to leave the original target alone if link 1275 creation fails, and reported that mv -f and -i weren't implemented (now fixed).</p> 1276 1277 <p>New config option: TOYBOX_NORECURSE prevents xexec() from making internal 1278 function calls (for nommu systems with a finite stack).</p> 1279 1280 <p>The "toybox" multiplexer command no longer adds a trailing space to each 1281 line of command names, so things like "./toybox | tr ' \n' '|'" to create 1282 a grep pattern snippet are easier to do. (Why you'd want to is your business, 1283 but the output is tidier now.)</p> 1284 1285 <h3>Infrastructure</h3> 1286 1287 <p>Isaac Dunham added Android support to portability.h, including compile 1288 probes for functions missing from bionic-libc, and annotated the commands that 1289 use those functions. We haven't really tested building against bionic, 1290 but in theory it's possible now.</p> 1291 1292 <p>Running the test suite now color codes the PASS/SKIP/FAIL notifications 1293 if output is to a tty. (And in case you missed it last time, VERBOSE=fail 1294 to stop at the first failure is really useful.)</p> 1295 1296 <p>In loopfiles_rw() use O_CLOEXEC instead of O_RDONLY to request the loop 1297 function close filehandles for us. (Otherwise the callback function must 1298 close each supplied filehandle itself.)</p> 1299 1300 <p>The printf-style escape parsing ("\n" and friends) got factored out into 1301 a new unescape() function.</p> 1302 1303 <a name="02-10-2014" /><a href="#02-10-2014"><hr><h2><b>October 2, 2014</b></h2></a> 1304 <blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. 1305 The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss... 1306 Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the 1307 difficulties." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.<p></blockquote> 1308 1309 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a> 1310 (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p> 1311 1312 <h3>New commands</h3> 1313 1314 <p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands 1315 (cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p> 1316 1317 <p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now 1318 ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth 1319 instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving 1320 looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to 1321 cut, touch, free, and id.</p> 1322 1323 <p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini 1324 Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded 1325 fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code. 1326 Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p> 1327 1328 <h3>Build infrastructure</h3> 1329 1330 <p><b>Parallel builds</b></p> 1331 1332 <p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of 1333 processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.) 1334 Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain 1335 about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now 1336 gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p> 1337 1338 <p><b>Standalone builds</b></p> 1339 1340 <p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to 1341 build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file 1342 selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro 1343 for the command. It enables each command's 1344 sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build 1345 full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when 1346 the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro 1347 now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY 1348 without the NEWTOY</p> 1349 1350 <p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that 1351 aren't building standalone yet are:</p> 1352 1353 <blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos, 1354 whoami</p></blockquote> 1355 1356 <p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY() 1357 entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries 1358 that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure 1359 is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command 1360 is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the 1361 code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible 1362 to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting 1363 design goals in the two contexts.)</p> 1364 1365 <p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual 1366 commands. 1367 1368 <p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p> 1369 1370 <p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh 1371 containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current 1372 configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an 1373 exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite 1374 got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p> 1375 1376 <h3>Internals</h3> 1377 1378 <p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking 1379 filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now 1380 done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added 1381 to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now 1382 requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false). 1383 Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various 1384 pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can 1385 use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode. 1386 Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether 1387 we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p> 1388 1389 <p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges 1390 (which happens when you suid something _other_ than root). 1391 The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the 1392 command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled), 1393 toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse 1394 internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth), 1395 always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when 1396 we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes, 1397 dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in 1398 error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an 1399 option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments 1400 saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched 1401 off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio. 1402 Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall 1403 with no arguments (segfaulted).</p> 1404 1405 <p><b>Portability</b></p> 1406 1407 <p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx 1408 to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl 1409 maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed 1410 instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section 1411 to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your 1412 build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do 1413 a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make 1414 it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns 1415 requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch 1416 to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current 1417 musl source control.)</p> 1418 1419 <p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have 1420 another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p> 1421 1422 <p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p> 1423 1424 <p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small 1425 allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing 1426 "$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic 1427 is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux 1428 filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters 1429 we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd), 1430 newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in 1431 filesystem).</p> 1432 1433 <h3>Documentation</h3> 1434 1435 <p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html 1436 documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently 1437 (it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p> 1438 1439 <p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup 1440 before the pending directory was added.</p> 1441 1442 <h3>Test Suite</h3> 1443 1444 <p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the 1445 testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p> 1446 1447 <p>Johan Bergstrm requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to 1448 stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu 1449 sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p> 1450 1451 <p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat, 1452 and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p> 1453 1454 <a name="07-07-2014" /><a href="#07-07-2014"><hr><h2><b>July 7, 2014</b></h2></a> 1455 <blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: 1456 most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many 1457 solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely 1458 concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd 1459 because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were 1460 unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1461 1462 <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> 1463 1464 <p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include: 1465 lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs, 1466 killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han, 1467 sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh, 1468 host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p> 1469 1470 <p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending): 1471 sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5, 1472 fallocate, and nbd-client.</p> 1473 1474 <p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps, 1475 bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd, 1476 login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's 1477 still more to do on all of those.)</p> 1478 1479 <p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against 1480 musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't 1481 support that target yet.)</p> 1482 1483 <p><b>Documentation:</b></p> 1484 1485 <p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with 1486 a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the 1487 "coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show 1488 stopper for incoming 1489 contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them 1490 during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes 1491 the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p> 1492 1493 <p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the 1494 full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p> 1495 1496 <p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is 1497 a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more 1498 elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option 1499 parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p> 1500 1501 <p><b>Fixes</b>:</p> 1502 1503 <p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default 1504 output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported 1505 bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init() 1506 was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound) 1507 had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be 1508 there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at 1509 the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test 1510 in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return 1511 success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and 1512 ferror() from xprintf().</p> 1513 1514 <p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff 1515 implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some 1516 diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from 1517 a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops 1518 at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set, 1519 which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of 1520 chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p> 1521 1522 <p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final 1523 build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of 1524 libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p> 1525 1526 <p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes, 1527 so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities. 1528 So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the 1529 setup code to setlocale().</p> 1530 1531 <p><b>Upgrades:</b></p> 1532 1533 <p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it 1534 to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also 1535 added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database 1536 parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p> 1537 1538 <p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making 1539 it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum 1540 for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other 1541 implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p> 1542 1543 <p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname), 1544 the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get 1545 a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p> 1546 1547 <p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP 1548 command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p> 1549 1550 <p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always 1551 build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p> 1552 1553 <p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so 1554 we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0 1555 filename" actually works again.</p> 1556 1557 <p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd, 1558 and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill, 1559 groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still 1560 working to fix them.</p> 1561 1562 <p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a 1563 dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new 1564 generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte 1565 to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's 1566 initialized to in toy_init).</p> 1567 1568 <p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and 1569 use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro 1570 contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs 1571 decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion 1572 bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you 1573 cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the 1574 first one, the build break is now more informative).</p> 1575 1576 <a name="20-04-2014" /><a href="#20-04-2014"><hr><h2><b>April 20, 2014</b></h2></a> 1577 <blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer 1578 which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks 1579 had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as 1580 far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to 1581 turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1582 1583 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on 1584 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And 1585 about time too.</p> 1586 1587 <p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h, 1588 that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text 1589 from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines. 1590 There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p> 1591 1592 <p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the 1593 way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the 1594 <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk, 1595 Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p> 1596 1597 <p><b>In pending:</b> 1598 Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more, 1599 groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added 1600 ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty. 1601 Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold. 1602 I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in 1603 compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side) 1604 and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p> 1605 1606 <p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot, 1607 cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus 1608 in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some 1609 work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations 1610 documented what their output actually meant).</p> 1611 1612 <p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to 1613 handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the 1614 fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h 1615 options (all commands, html output). 1616 Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually 1617 set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross 1618 compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween 1619 sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code. 1620 Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options 1621 to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and 1622 allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded 1623 tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after 1624 that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting. 1625 Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of 1626 pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified 1627 find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on 1628 the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions 1629 now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with 1630 aliasing.</p> 1631 1632 <p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you 1633 can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same 1634 .c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the 1635 bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example. 1636 i 1637 <p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers 1638 not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h 1639 was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc 1640 configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p> 1641 1642 <p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig 1643 build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily 1644 the absolute latest build environment.)</p> 1645 1646 <p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid(). 1647 xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd 1648 and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command, 1649 get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and 1650 xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into 1651 bzcat.c.</p> 1652 1653 <p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the 1654 help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output. 1655 The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about 1656 #including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The 1657 <a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading 1658 of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for 1659 good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion 1660 at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p> 1661 1662 <a name="18-11-2013" /><a href="#18-11-2013"><hr><h2><b>November 18, 2013</b></h2></a> 1663 <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." - 1664 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1665 1666 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.7.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.7</a> is based on 1667 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p> 1668 1669 <p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted 1670 reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from 1671 pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some 1672 cleanup.</p> 1673 1674 <p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going 1675 into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted 1676 dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and 1677 an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p> 1678 1679 <p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer 1680 added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem. 1681 William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input 1682 (the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug 1683 where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault). 1684 I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using 1685 the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a 1686 synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with 1687 $CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted 1688 a typo in the web page.</p> 1689 1690 <p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from 1691 bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by 1692 --longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal 1693 querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a 1694 debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply). 1695 The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and 1696 micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite 1697 now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p> 1698 1699 <a name="17-09-2013" /><a href="#17-09-2013"><hr><h2><b>September 17, 2013</b></h2></a> 1700 <blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number." 1701 Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway 1702 station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function, 1703 and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> 1704 </blockquote> 1705 1706 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on 1707 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p> 1708 1709 <p>This release adds 1710 several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han 1711 submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and 1712 a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted 1713 acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p> 1714 1715 <p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker). 1716 The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah" 1717 instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in. 1718 Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain 1719 other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who 1720 heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID 1721 namespace support.</p> 1722 1723 <h3>Pending</h3> 1724 1725 <p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should 1726 probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd, 1727 dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from 1728 Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet), 1729 syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar, 1730 test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E. 1731 M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p> 1732 1733 <p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't 1734 ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig 1735 and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up 1736 logger and syslogd...</p> 1737 1738 <p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory, 1739 but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du, 1740 expand, and touch.</p> 1741 1742 <h3>Infrastructure</h3> 1743 1744 <p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the 1745 multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes, 1746 OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a 1747 command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If 1748 you're curious, you can do:</p> 1749 1750 <blockquote><pre> 1751 make defconfig 1752 make 1753 mkdir singles 1754 for i in $(./toybox) 1755 do 1756 echo $i 1757 PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break 1758 done 1759 </pre> 1760 <p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p> 1761 </blockquote> 1762 1763 <p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this 1764 time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p> 1765 1766 <p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions 1767 not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains 1768 functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit). 1769 This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p> 1770 1771 <p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude 1772 logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts 1773 should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ; 1774 option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E. 1775 --color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p> 1776 1777 <p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf 1778 does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it 1779 for us".</p> 1780 1781 <p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid(). 1782 It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite 1783 so much anymore.</p> 1784 1785 <p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly 1786 linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are 1787 using it now.</p> 1788 1789 <p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag 1790 (-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables) 1791 that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept 1792 into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler, 1793 "-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p> 1794 1795 <h3>Bugfixes</h3> 1796 1797 <p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to 1798 finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f 1799 someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once). 1800 Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p> 1801 1802 <p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that 1803 python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks 1804 for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer 1805 then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p> 1806 1807 <p>Ashwini Sharma 1808 pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some 1809 configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p> 1810 1811 <p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and 1812 a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p> 1813 1814 <p>The new function xexec_optargs() 1815 replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs 1816 during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p> 1817 1818 <p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which 1819 didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup 1820 between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh 1821 command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p> 1822 1823 <p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't 1824 delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm 1825 should now be fixed.</p> 1826 1827 <p> 1828 <a name="26-07-2013" /><a href="#26-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 26, 2013</b></h2></a> 1829 <p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git 1830 mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the 1831 mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches 1832 against it and post them to the list.</p> 1833 1834 <a name="02-07-2013" /><a href="#02-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 2, 2013</b></h2></a> 1835 <blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You 1836 should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people 1837 like you." - 1838 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1839 1840 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on 1841 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds 1842 uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by 1843 default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and 1844 enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups". 1845 Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv". 1846 </p> 1847 1848 <p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and 1849 each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help" 1850 and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p> 1851 1852 <p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client, 1853 logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup. 1854 Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up. 1855 (It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p> 1856 1857 <p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach 1858 more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The 1859 <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis 1860 of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p> 1861 1862 <p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected, 1863 condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught 1864 -l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices. 1865 Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking), 1866 and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no 1867 corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work). 1868 Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham 1869 fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output 1870 field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means 1871 to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda 1872 moved file permission display code to lib so ls and 1873 stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the 1874 last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it 1875 (ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user). 1876 </p> 1877 1878 <p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global 1879 variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc 1880 debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and 1881 that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of 1882 just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking 1883 against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes 1884 for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes 1885 various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical 1886 (breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names). 1887 1888 <p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build 1889 system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The 1890 release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control. 1891 Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p> 1892 </p> 1893 1894 <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 1895 BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first 1896 paragraph now says:</p> 1897 1898 <blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this 1899 software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote> 1900 1901 <p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this 1902 permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all 1903 copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects 1904 that consider BSD and GPL compatible have <a href=https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/crypto/aes_generic.c>files with 1905 both license notices</a> on them (sometimes at <a href=http://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/shell/ash.c>opposite ends of the file</a> to make the conflict 1906 less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate 1907 the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p> 1908 1909 <p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more 1910 or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it 1911 BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p> 1912 1913 <a name="21-03-2013" /><a href="#21-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 21, 2013</b></h2></a> 1914 <p>Video of my ELC talk 1915 "<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>" 1916 is up on youtube. Related materials include the 1917 <a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an 1918 <a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p> 1919 1920 <p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about 1921 the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p> 1922 1923 <ul> 1924 <li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li> 1925 <ul> 1926 <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li> 1927 <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li> 1928 </ul> 1929 <li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li> 1930 <ul> 1931 <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li> 1932 </ul> 1933 <li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li> 1934 <li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li> 1935 <li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li> 1936 <ul> 1937 <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li> 1938 <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li> 1939 <ul> 1940 <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li> 1941 <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li> 1942 </ul> 1943 </ul> 1944 </ul> 1945 </span> 1946 1947 1948 <a name="14-03-2013" /><a href="#14-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 14, 2013</b></h2></a> 1949 <blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." - 1950 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1951 1952 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on 1953 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding 1954 the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p> 1955 1956 <p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes 1957 getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds. 1958 "id -Gn root" should now print root's groups 1959 instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under 1960 Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you 1961 can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p> 1962 1963 <p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending". 1964 Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig. 1965 Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig 1966 should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p> 1967 1968 <p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries 1969 (klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p> 1970 1971 <a name="18-01-2013" /><a href="#18-01-2013"><hr><h2><b>January 18, 2013</b></h2></a> 1972 <blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 1973 1974 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on 1975 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There 1976 are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the 1977 <a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p> 1978 1979 <p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s 1980 and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to 1981 kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite. 1982 Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p> 1983 1984 <p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and 1985 readlink commands. The segfault in ls 1986 happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the 1987 default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an 1988 extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing 1989 a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath() 1990 code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test 1991 suite checks for it).</p> 1992 1993 <p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the 1994 error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's 1995 still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error 1996 bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That 1997 means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right 1998 error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.) 1999 Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG 2000 doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with 2001 at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic 2002 (and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma). 2003 dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree 2004 functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using 2005 libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means 2006 it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p> 2007 2008 <p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that 2009 disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back 2010 to -Os by default now.</p> 2011 2012 <a name="15-12-2012" /><a href="#15-12-2012"><hr><h2><b>December 15, 2012</b></h2></a> 2013 <blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a 2014 thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly 2015 go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." 2016 </p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2017 2018 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on 2019 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is 2020 just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal 2021 Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's 2022 a new stable version.</p> 2023 2024 <p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch 2025 (from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a 2026 bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8 2027 support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option. 2028 Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof. 2029 The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports 2030 -fenq.</p> 2031 2032 <p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library, 2033 and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel 2034 features we depend on start to drop out).</p> 2035 2036 <p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per 2037 level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more 2038 than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out, 2039 or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an 2040 earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README, 2041 the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory 2042 (so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p> 2043 2044 <p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist(). 2045 Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with 2046 full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to 2047 stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing 2048 it).</p> 2049 2050 <p>The open group broke their website so the 2051 <a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008 2052 now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with 2053 pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while 2054 I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p> 2055 2056 <p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant 2057 because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current 2058 implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option 2059 to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks, 2060 but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024 2061 filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p> 2062 2063 <a name="13-11-2012" /><a href="#13-11-2012"><hr><h2><b>November 13, 2012</b></h2></a> 2064 <blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins." 2065 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2066 2067 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on 2068 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p> 2069 2070 <p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and 2071 Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and 2072 md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix, 2073 unix2dos).</p> 2074 2075 <p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by 2076 default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name. 2077 Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p> 2078 2079 <p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into 2080 "posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008, 2081 the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig 2082 and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on). 2083 An android directory is planned (see the updated 2084 <a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p> 2085 2086 <p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's 2087 global block are now automatically generated, commands should 2088 #define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that 2089 command.</p> 2090 2091 <p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and - 2092 in them, such as switch_root.</p> 2093 2094 <p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of 2095 uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers. 2096 The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite 2097 properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's 2098 fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage 2099 calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp 2100 and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces 2101 break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite 2102 properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's 2103 fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib 2104 fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary 2105 on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending 2106 on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in 2107 a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking 2108 partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts: 2109 this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it 2110 wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite 2111 some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to 2112 successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc 2113 versions was added to portability.h.</p> 2114 2115 <p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a 2116 rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All 2117 the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards 2118 document, where applicable.</p> 2119 2120 <p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into 2121 a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p> 2122 2123 <p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're 2124 back now.</p> 2125 </span> 2126 2127 <a name="23-07-2012" /><a href="#23-07-2012"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2012</b></h2></a> 2128 <blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys 2129 out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked 2130 out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2131 2132 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on 2133 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p> 2134 2135 <p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from 2136 the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p> 2137 2138 <p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed 2139 taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han 2140 contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a 2141 case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p> 2142 2143 <p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the 2144 <a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and 2145 <a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option 2146 to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime), 2147 fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the 2148 corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding 2149 glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing 2150 pending output on exit.</p> 2151 2152 <a name="25-06-2012" /><a href="#25-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 25, 2012</b></h2></a> 2153 <blockquote><p>"For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2154 2155 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit 2156 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's 2157 mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than 2158 x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which 2159 now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test 2160 suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the 2161 musl libc.</p> 2162 2163 <p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here 2164 it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40 2165 pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p> 2166 </span> 2167 2168 <a name="12-06-2012" /><a href="#12-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 12, 2012</b></h2></a> 2169 <blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that 2170 he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the 2171 wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was 2172 muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had 2173 always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely 2174 the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> 2175 2176 <p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>, 2177 so here it is, based 2178 on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the 2179 statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should 2180 actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting 2181 that).</p> 2182 2183 <p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development 2184 doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course. 2185 The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which 2186 threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit 2187 more frequent from here on.</p> 2188 2189 <p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory 2190 tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that 2191 which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p> 2192 2193 <p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown, 2194 chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if 2195 you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug 2196 on slackware.</p> 2197 2198 <p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and 2199 mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint, 2200 vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups. 2201 Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p> 2202 2203 <p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell 2204 wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove 2205 deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and 2206 musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got 2207 some cleanups and bugfixes.</p> 2208 2209 <p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not 2210 to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's 2211 problematic).</p> 2212 2213 <p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now, 2214 yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the 2215 SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox 2216 multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer 2217 segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full 2218 posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next 2219 release.)</p> 2220 2221 <p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros 2222 for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue 2223 is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p> 2224 2225 <p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built 2226 Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that 2227 'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing. 2228 (The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted 2229 yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before 2230 1.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p> 2231 2232 2233 <a name="03-03-2012" /><a href="#03-03-2012"><hr><h2><b>March 3, 2012</b></h2></a> 2234 2235 <blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral 2236 without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them. 2237 Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking 2238 for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p> 2239 </p></blockquote> 2240 2241 <p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based 2242 on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>. This 2243 time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt 2244 binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p> 2245 2246 <p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I 2247 have not quite been keeping up.)</p> 2248 2249 <p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod, 2250 insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename. Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln, 2251 realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall. Daniel 2252 Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests 2253 for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp. 2254 Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed 2255 cross compiling to work more reliably.</p> 2256 2257 <p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's 2258 code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new 2259 code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python 2260 bloat-o-meter.)</p> 2261 2262 <p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from 2263 Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott, 2264 more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano 2265 Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and 2266 optimizations.</p> 2267 2268 <p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link, 2269 dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months 2270 and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p> 2271 2272 2273 <a name="12-02-2012" /><a href="#12-02-2012"><hr><h2><b>February 12, 2012</b></h2></a> 2274 <blockquote><p> 2275 "for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at 2276 least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two 2277 important respects..."</p> 2278 <p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> 2279 2280 <p>Here's the first BSD licensed release, 2281 <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization 2282 point than anything particularly useful. 47 commands in a reasonably 2283 ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially 2284 finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several 2285 patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p> 2286 2287 <p>More to come...</p> 2288 2289 <hr> 2290 <a name="15-11-2011" /><a href="#15-11-2011"><hr><h2><b>November 15, 2011</b></h2></a> 2291 - Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2 2292 clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line 2293 implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p> 2294 2295 <p>More to come...</p> 2296 2297 <hr> 2298 2299 <p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p> 2300 2301 <!--#include file="footer.html" --> 2302
