Toybox: All-in-One Linux Command Line

I think Samsung still use Tizen (still Linux, seems to use Toybox) and LG uses WebOS (Linux again, not sure if it uses Toybox).

I guess? I haven't used Busybox on Windows directly. This is a more complete environment for C/C++ development, which is what I used it for -- i.e. a lightweight alternative to Visual Studio / figuring out how to setup MSYS/mingw and going thru its package manager.

(As for MSYS, I somehow ended up with 4 separate installs of it due to each programming language bundling its own version!)

How would you improve the description in the readme file?

    The toybox build produces a multicall binary, a "swiss-army-knife" program
    that acts differently depending on the name it was called by (cp, mv, cat...).
    Installing toybox adds symlinks for each command name to the $PATH.

> I think... it builds a busybox system based on desired commands (similar to a dockerfile, but using a REPL?).

I am now very curious how you arrived at this conclusion. Did you make use of any LLM? If so, which model and what prompt did you use?

Is it fair to say GNU coreutils "inspired" the need for Busybox?

The Nixpkgs search page for it https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=25.05&show=toybox&... shows the list of its outputs (executables):

    [ acpi arch ascii base32 base64 basename blkdiscard blkid blockdev bunzip2 bzcat cal cat chattr chgrp chmod chown chroot chrt chvt cksum clear cmp comm count cp cpio crc32 cut date dd deallocvt devmem df dirname dmesg dnsdomainname dos2unix du echo egrep eject env expand factor fallocate false fgrep file find flock fmt fold free freeramdisk fsfreeze fstype fsync ftpget ftpput getconf getopt gpiodetect gpiofind gpioget gpioinfo gpioset grep groups gunzip halt head help hexedit host hostname httpd hwclock i2cdetect i2cdump i2cget i2cset i2ctransfer iconv id ifconfig inotifyd insmod install ionice iorenice iotop kill killall killall5 link linux32 ln logger login logname losetup ls lsattr lsmod lspci lsusb makedevs mcookie md5sum memeater microcom mix mkdir mkfifo mknod mkpasswd mkswap mktemp modinfo mount mountpoint mv nbd-client nbd-server nc netcat netstat nice nl nohup nproc nsenter od oneit openvt partprobe paste patch pgrep pidof ping ping6 pivot_root pkill pmap poweroff printenv printf prlimit ps pwd pwdx pwgen readahead readelf readlink realpath reboot renice reset rev rfkill rm rmdir rmmod rtcwake sed seq setfattr setsid sha1sum sha224sum sha256sum sha384sum sha3sum sha512sum shred shuf sleep sntp sort split stat strings su swapoff swapon switch_root sync sysctl tac tail tar taskset tee test time timeout top touch toybox true truncate ts tsort tty tunctl uclampset ulimit umount uname unicode uniq unix2dos unlink unshare uptime usleep uudecode uuencode uuidgen vconfig vmstat w watch watchdog wc wget which who whoami xargs xxd yes zcat

That's... an impressive set of Unix functionality in a single binary... AFAIK, if this works like Busybox does, these are all actually just wrappers that call into Toybox with this command as a parameter. EDIT: Nope, it's literally just symlinks with names detected by toybox that dictate how it will behave, and this is apparently called a "multicall binary"

And yes, the [ (open bracket) is a command in POSIX shell.

thanks, that is the most understandable explanation I've seen!

Anyone can send mails to a mailing list. It doesn't mean anything.

busybox.net is down, along with their git and bugzilla, and the github mirror has last commit a year ago. The bugged tc.c was last updated 2 years ago.

https://github.com/mirror/busybox/blob/master/networking/tc....

So, yes, it looks abandoned.

I don't understand the deduction, either.

But it seems that no BusyBox bug-fixer has spotted an easy-to-fix error that is stopping the BusyBox Bugzilla from working, and causing the hyperlink in that e-mail to lead to an error message that dumps out a glob of SQL and stack trace in black on red. It has a table named groups, and Bugzilla is attempting to use the table without quoting the MySQL keyword.

* https://github.com/bugzilla/bugzilla/commit/08679016bd83d2b1...

This bug was fixed in Bugzilla over a year ago. BusyBox's instance of Bugzilla is still exhibiting it today. It makes Buzilla unusable. Thus I do wonder at all of the automated messages to that mailing list with hyperlinks to stuff that does not work. Perhaps no-one is reading the mailing list as well as no-one using the bug tracker.