Software
skarnet.org

s6-portable-utils

What is it ?

s6-portable-utils is a set of tiny general Unix utilities, often performing well-known tasks such as cut and grep, but optimized for simplicity and small size. They were designed for embedded systems and other constrained environments, but they work everywhere.

Other set of small utilities are usually system-specific; for instance, the (otherwise good) BusyBox project only works on Linux.

Some of s6-portable-utils' programs are a conformant implementation of a POSIX utility as determined by the Single Unix Specification, version 4; the relevant documentation pages mentions this. However, none of the s6-portable-utils programs supports internationalization.

It is now an explicit non-goal of s6-portable-utils to duplicate the work of existing projects that aim to provide a lightweight implementation of standard commands. No more rewriting of standard commands will occur in s6-portable-utils; the package is now used to host specific utilities such as s6-uniquename. Existing utilities that duplicate standard commands remain in the package because removing them would risk breaking things, but there are no plans to further improve upon them.

Prefixing the name of this package — and the names of the binaries it provides — with s6- was a naming mistake. It happened in the early days of the s6 project, before it grew and became an ecosystem focused on supervision, service management and init; despite sharing the same author and the same philosophy, and being designed to work with it, s6-portable-utils is not, stricto sensu, part of the s6 ecosystem, and if you arrived here while trying to understand what s6 is, you are on the wrong page. I apologize for the confusion.

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Installation

Requirements

• A POSIX-compliant system with a standard C development environment
• GNU make, version 3.81 or later
• skalibs version 2.15.0.0 or later. It's a build-time requirement. It's also a run-time requirement if you link against the shared version of the skalibs library.

Licensing

s6-portable-utils is free software. It is available under the ISC license.

Download

• The current released version of s6-portable-utils is 2.3.1.2. You can access its checksum here.
• Alternatively, you can checkout a copy of the s6-portable-utils git repository:

   git clone git://git.skarnet.org/s6-portable-utils 

• There's also a Codeberg mirror, or a GitHub mirror, or a SourceHut mirror of the s6-portable-utils git repository.

Compilation

• See the enclosed INSTALL file for installation details.
• Starting with version 2.3.0.0, you can use the --enable-multicall configure option to save disk space.

Upgrade notes

• This page lists the differences to be aware of between the previous versions of s6-portable-utils and the current one.

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Reference

Commands

All these commands exit 111 if they encounter a temporary error, and 100 if they encounter a permanent error - such as a misuse. They exit 127 if they're trying to execute into a program and cannot find it, and 126 if they fail to execute into a program for another reason.

(Miscellaneous tools)

• The s6-basename program
• The s6-cat program
• The s6-chmod program
• The s6-chown program
• The s6-clock program
• The s6-cut program
• The s6-dirname program
• The s6-dumpenv program
• The s6-echo program
• The s6-env program
• The s6-expr program
• The s6-false program
• The s6-format-filter program
• The s6-grep program
• The s6-head program
• The s6-hiercopy program
• The s6-linkname program
• The s6-ln program
• The s6-ls program
• The s6-maximumtime program
• The s6-mkdir program
• The s6-mkfifo program
• The s6-nice program
• The s6-nuke program
• The s6-pause program
• The s6-printenv program
• The s6-quote-filter program
• The s6-quote program
• The s6-rename program
• The s6-rmrf program
• The s6-seq program
• The s6-sleep program
• The s6-sort program
• The s6-sync program
• The s6-tai64ndiff program
• The s6-tail program
• The s6-touch program
• The s6-true program
• The s6-uniquename program
• The s6-unquote-filter program
• The s6-unquote program
• The s6-update-symlinks program
• The seekablepipe program

(Multicall configuration)

• The s6-portable-utils multicall binary

Related resources

• s6-portable-utils is discussed on the skaware mailing-list.

s6-portable-utils manual pages

• Lennart Jablonka is providing the s6-portable-utils documentation as a set of man pages.