simpleutils

simpleutils is as an alternative (though not a replacement) coreutils package.

Note that simpleutils is not supposed to be a full and 100% faithful replacement for GNU coreutils nor it is meant to be POSIX complient. I just wanted to create this for sheer fun and to challenge myself.

Though I do want to make the code as simple as possible, always trying to follow the Unix philosophy and the KISS principle, note that I am not perfect nor an experienced programmer. If you notice something can be better, especially more simple, please contribute to the code!

Building

The only requirement to build the coreutils is GNU Make.

Then you can use make to build every utility, and then make install to install them into ~/.local/bin.

By default, each binary will have the su- prefix, in order to not meddle with your system's coreutils. You may change the prefix by passing the BIN_PREFIX variable to make and make install:

make BIN_PREFIX=<prefix>
make install BIN_PREFIX=<prefix>

(replacing <prefix> with you desired prefix)

In the same fashion, you can also pass in a different install path to make install with the PREFIX variable (together with BIN_PREFIX or not):

make BIN_PREFIX=<prefix>
make install BIN_PREFIX=<prefix> PREFIX=<install path>

(replacing <install path> with your desired install directory)

If you just want to test out some utility, you can also use the make run command:

make run UTIL=<utility> ARGS="<arguments>"

Replace <utility> with your desired utility (cat, for example) and <arguments> with any command line arguments you wish to pass to that utility (--help, for example).

Progress

Utility	Completed	Notes
cat	🟨	Functional
cp	🟨	Simple file copies only
dirname	✅
false	✅
ln	🟨	Basic functionality only
mkdir	🟨	Basic functionality only
mv	🟨	Basic functionality only
printenv	✅
pwd	✅
rm	✅	Files only
rmdir	✅
touch	🟨	Basic functionality only
true	✅
whoami	✅

Acknowledgements and references

• busybox
• GNU coreutils
• uutils
• linux.die.net
• pubs.opengroup.org (POSIX specifications)

Main goals

• Finish simpler programs
• Make simpler programs feature complete and/or equivalent to GNU
• Write some kind of documentation for every program
• Finish all coreutils