The goal of the Toybox project is to create simple implementations of all the important Linux command line utilities. These implementations should be small (the entire project should total less than a megabyte, uncompressed), fast, simple, and correctly implemented (which is related to standards compliance, but isn't quite the same thing). Click for more about the design goals
Toybox has configurable levels of functionality, and should scale from tiny embedded systems up to full general purpose desktop and development environments. The author plans to run it on his laptop, and the Firmware Linux project is trying to get a complete Linux system to rebuild itself from source code using toybox.
Toybox is Licensed under GPL version 2.
Toybox can be built as a single "swiss army knife" executable (ala BusyBox or Red Hat's Nash), or each command can be built as a traditional independent executable.
The current list of commands implemented by toybox is at the top of the news page
. That list is updated when new commands go in.In general, configuring toybox for "defconfig" enables all the commands compete enough to be useful. Configuring "allyesconfig" enables partially implemented commands as well.
The following commands are incomplete, but demonstrate some basic functionality: bzcat/bunzip2, help, mke2fs, sh/toysh, mdev.
The following are partially implemented commands that don't actually do anything yet: mke2fs.
The Toybox Shell (toysh) aims to be a reasonable bash replacement. It implements the "sh" and "toysh" commands, plus the built-in commands "cd" and "exit". This is the largest single sub-project in toybox.
The following additional commands may be built into the shell (but not as separate executables): cd, exit, if, while, for, function, fg, bg, jobs, source, alias, export, set, unset, read, trap, and exec. (Note: not done yet.)
The toybox todo list mentions many potential commands which may be added to this project. (Whether that file is readable by anybody but the project's maintainer is open to debate.)
The criteria for a toybox 1.0 release is that a system built from just the Linux kernel, toybox, uClibc, and a compiler (such as tinycc) can rebuild itself from source code.
Most commands are implemented according to The Single Unix Specification version 3 where applicable. This does not mean that Toybox is implementing every SUSv3 utility: some such as SCCS and ed are obsolete, while others such as c99 are outside the scope of the project. Toybox also isn't implementing full internationalization support: it should be 8-bit clean and handle UTF-8, but otherwise we leave this to X11 and higher layers. And some things (like $CDPATH support in "cd") await a good explanation of why to bother with them. (The standard provides an important frame of reference, but is not infallable set of commandments to be blindly obeyed.)
The other major sources of commands are the Linux man pages, and testing the behavior of existing commands (although not generally looking at their source code). SUSv3 does not include many basic commands such as "mount", "init", and "mke2fs", which are kind of nice to have.
This project is maintained as a mercurial archive. To get a copy of the current development version, either use mercurial (hg clone http://landley.net/toybox) or click on one of the zip/gz/bz2 links at the top of the mercurial archive browser page to get an archive of the appropriate version. Click tags to see all the tagged release versions ("tip" is the current development version).
The maintainer's development log and the project's mailing list are also good ways to track what's going on with the project.