Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line

by welovebunnies • 10 months ago

117 50 10 months ago

opan• 10 months ago

IIRC this was made to solve a licensing issue with busybox (toybox being more permissive) and be included with Android. As a fan of copyleft, initially the idea annoyed me, but I eventually came to the conclusion that if it was the only way to include better tools in a particular OS out of the box, it was probably fine.

I recall busybox being often used for gpl enforcement, so I wonder now how widespread toybox is by various companies hoping to avoid that. Do modern Smart TVs and such use it?

GalaxyNova• 10 months ago

I believe most smart TVs use Android as the base, so I would think yes.

ChocolateGod• 10 months ago

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

dgl• 10 months ago

The license page and linked blog posts mentions this: https://landley.net/toybox/license.html

I like the 0BSD license (see my https://xn--gba.st), AWS also uses the semantically equivalent MIT-0 license for code samples, etc.

andai2• 10 months ago

See also, for Windows: w64devkit, and the included busybox-w32

https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

https://frippery.org/busybox/

tredre3• 10 months ago

Although I love and use w64devkit myself, it seems like you should point people towards the original busybox rather than take two detours through an unrelated toolkit using an unofficial port of it?

andai2• 10 months ago

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!)

neilv• 10 months ago

BusyBox got its name from a collection of toys in one assembly/container:

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=fisher+price+busy+box

Denatonium• 10 months ago

I wonder if Toybox got its name from the Soundgarden song of the same name or if it was chosen due to the similarity of Busybox's collection of toys.

throwaway2046• 10 months ago

I really appreciate Toybox for its clean codebase and permissive license, hopefully it reaches feature parity with Busybox in the future. Version 0.8.13 is long overdue.

mcswell2• 10 months ago

But what IS it?

tetris11• 10 months ago

I think... it builds a busybox system based on desired commands (similar to a dockerfile, but using a REPL?). I have to admit that the README is next to useless.

stonogo• 10 months ago

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.

watusername• 10 months ago

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?

chasil2• 10 months ago

Toybox is a clone of Busybox with a less restrictive license.

Toybox is used on Android to implement a number of POSIX.2 utilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#Controversy_over_Toybo...

MuffinFlavored• 10 months ago

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

coffeebeanHH• 10 months ago

It's sort of a remastered Version of busybox. Please refer to Rob himself for explaining.

There's a good intro on yt [1] and a "demo" in [2]

edit: Well Sorry, [2] was about mkroot. I just skipped through the video. I thought it was related to toybox/busybox. Maybe somewhere in the talk. Has been a while since I last watched it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk9TatW9ino

Nursie• 10 months ago

A static binary that contains a huge variety of useful posix commands (ls/cp/mv/cat/md5sum/nohup/mount etc etc), all baked into one program, which exhibits different behaviour depending on how it is called - if you name the executable to one of these, or provide a hard or soft link with that name, it will behave as that program.

This generally makes things easier on devices with strict storage space constraints by reducing the overhead of having separate executables and/or libraries for the code for all these. It may reduce load times in very constrained systems compared to dynamic linking too, as everything is bundled in the one image, and in some cases it can exhibit performance gains.

It's generally (but not exclusively) of interest to embedded device manufacturers. Toybox is licensed very permissively, compared to busybox's use of GPL, so manufacturers like it. IIRC it is now used in android.

pmarreck2• 10 months ago

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.

mcswell2• 10 months ago

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

csmantle• 10 months ago

I guess it has already been posted in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28627433

Jotalea• 10 months ago

I can't stop misreading this tool as "Toby Fox".

Anyways, I might use this in my own distro for fun.

userbinator• 10 months ago

As a contrast, in the DOS world the file COMMAND.COM provided both the shell as well as most of the basic file management commands which would be separate files on Unix-like systems (cp, ls, mkdir, mv, rm, rmdir, etc.); and some specialised DOS-compatible systems had the whole basic OS including the kernel, device drivers, and shell along with its builtins in a single flat-loaded binary.

M95D3• 10 months ago

It looks to me that busybox is abandoned [1]. Let's hope google money keeps toybox alive.

[1]https://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox-cvs/2024-January...

f33d51732• 10 months ago

That is by no means the most recent message to the list, I don't see what causes you to claim it's abandoned.

JdeBP• 10 months ago

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.

M95D3• 10 months ago

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.

westurner• 10 months ago

toybox/library; 0BSD, C: https://github.com/landley/toybox/tree/master/lib

src/uucore/src/lib/features, findutils, diffutils; MIT, Rust: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/tree/main/src/uucore/src...

tracker1• 10 months ago

Not sure what this offers above or beyond the rust uutils/coreutils...

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils

Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line

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