Toybox (Linux command line utilities)

Toybox (Linux command line utilities)

Toybox is a set of lightweight command line utilities for Linux and Android. It includes many common Unix commands like cat, echo, printf, and provides a space-efficient alternative to BusyBox.
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Toybox: Lightweight Command Line Utilities for Linux & Androids

A set of command line utilities for Linux and Android, featuring common Unix commands like cat, echo, printf, and offering a space-efficient alternative to BusyBox.

What is Toybox (Linux command line utilities)?

Toybox is a set of command line utilities for Linux and Android operating systems. It is designed to be a more modern and improved alternative to BusyBox, providing common Unix tools and commands in a space-efficient manner.

Some of the commands included in Toybox are: cat, echo, printf, ls, dd, hexdump, uname, chroot, kill, mount, rmdir, mv, sleep, true, false, test, etc. So it covers many of the basic commands software developers, system administrators or advanced users would need to manage and access the system.

Toybox emphasizes being lightweight and modular, so you can select just the components you need. This makes it well-suited for small, embedded Linux distributions like those used on routers, IoT devices, and Android. It builds small binaries for each command, rather than putting everything into one large executable. This can help reduce memory usage and disk space requirements.

The project aims to implement commands using simple, clean, POSIX-compliant code that is both human and machine readable. Toybox is licensed under the open source BSD license, allowing it to be freely used in both open source and proprietary products. Overall, it attempts to provide a practical, efficient, buzzword-free implementation of core command line tools for modern Linux-based operating systems.

Toybox (Linux command line utilities) Features

Features

  1. Includes many common Linux command line utilities like cat, echo, printf, ls, rm, mv, cp, touch, mkdir, rmdir, ln, true, false, test, seq, head, tail, cut, basename, date, dd, df, du, find, grep, egrep, fgrep, kill, pidof, pwd, sleep, sort, tee, tr, uniq, wc, whoami
  2. Small size - aims to minimize disk usage and memory footprint
  3. Designed for embedded Linux systems
  4. Supports Android
  5. Written in C, builds with minimal dependencies
  6. Modular design - utilities are built as separate programs instead of one monolithic binary
  7. Includes toybox shell (sh)

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Lightweight and efficient

Includes many essential Linux utilities

Good for resource-constrained embedded systems

Android support

Modular design allows only needed utilities to be included

Actively maintained

Liberal BSD-style license

Cons

Not all standard Unix utilities included

No shell job control like bg/fg

Limited shell features compared to bash/zsh

Somewhat limited adoption outside embedded systems


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