Hey all, I think it's about time we started a minimalist, statically linked set of core utilities. The BSD family are bloated, and the GNU monstrous. Some of us seem to be resorting to using those from Plan 9, which were designed for another operating system and exist on Unix through a compatibility shim.
So, in a glorious demonstration of NIH syndrome, let's make our own! I'm unsure exactly which utilities we should include (suggestions on a comprehensive set?), but in terms of functionality a good rule of thumb is to only include flags present in both POSIX and Plan 9, thus making a sweet little subset. There are exceptions to this, like grep -q and ls -a, but it's a useful guideline. I've written a handful so far (basename, cat, echo, false, grep, tee, touch, true, wc), which I've attached. Each tool is between 6 and 88 SLOC, and compiles with musl into a static binary between 13K and 45K in size. The manual pages are nice and short, too. If anyone else wants to contribute a tool written in the same style they are most welcome. I'd like to set up an hg repo soon, but I'm quite busy with exams atm. Thanks, cls
sbase-0.0.tar.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data