Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line

by welovebunnies on 10/5/2025, 7:09:35 PM with 53 comments

  • by opan on 10/5/2025, 9:08:49 PM

    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?

  • by neilv on 10/5/2025, 9:30:42 PM

    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

  • by userbinator on 10/6/2025, 5:15:17 AM

    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.

  • by csmantle on 10/6/2025, 3:36:27 AM

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

  • by westurner on 10/6/2025, 7:12:29 PM

    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...

  • by M95D on 10/6/2025, 6:19:41 PM

    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...

  • by throwaway2046 on 10/5/2025, 11:45:42 PM

    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.

  • by andai on 10/5/2025, 9:13:24 PM

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

    https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

    https://frippery.org/busybox/

  • by mcswell on 10/6/2025, 12:35:33 AM

    But what IS it?

  • by Jotalea on 10/6/2025, 4:34:23 AM

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

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

  • by tracker1 on 10/6/2025, 11:06:12 PM

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

    https://github.com/uutils/coreutils