A collection of core tools for a POSIX-compatible operating system.

Each program is self-contained, with no external dependencies even among other parts of ctools. All programs presume the locale is UTF-8. Each program is C99 and compatible with its POSIX.1-2017 specification and may be built in an environment which provides POSIX.1-2017 system interfaces. Where the specification is ambiguous, implementation-defined, or unspecified, the programs choose their behavior at random, to discourage relying on these behaviors; or will abort, if practical.

Each "one-shot" tool is a single C file under src/ and can be compiled with the following:

c99 -o $tool -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200809L src/$tool.c

More complex tools may have several files under one directory:

c99 -o $tool -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200809L -Isrc/$tool/ src/$tool/*.c

To enable optional XSI support, use -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=700 instead of -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE .

Alternatively, you can compile all of the tools with meson:

meson . build ninja -C build

This is recommended when packaging ctools for meson-supported systems. Some options are available when building with meson, consult meson_options.txt.

Man pages are provided via scdoc and may be found in the doc directory. If using meson and scdoc is installed, man pages are built and installed by default. Note that a manual reader is not provided by ctools, though the man command must do something useful for your system to be considered POSIX compatible.

#Conformance tests

Build with meson and run ninja -C build test to run POSIX conformance tests against ctools.

Some conformance tests require Linux to be run, and will be skipped on other systems. These tests generally require some non-portable behavior to verify the behavior of some commands; for example the nice tests will inspect /proc to verify its behavior. Unsupported systems will skip these tests.

Additional tests may be skipped if certain external environment variables are not provided. To run all supported tests for your system, set the following variables in your environment:

ARCH to the value expected to be printed by uname -m .

to the value expected to be printed by . ESCALATE to the name of a command which will run an arbitrary program as the system administrator, such as sudo .

ctools includes POSIX.1-2017 base utilities, but does not support any POSIX.1-2017 option groups, with the exception of XSI support where relevant to POSIX base utilities (optional). See the STATUS file for a summary of utilities defined by POSIX and their status for inclusion in ctools.

A shell is not provided. mrsh is recommended for this purpose.

Mail patches, bugs, etc, to the mailing list: ~sircmpwn/ctools@lists.sr.ht

Consult https://git-send-email.io for information on preparing patches.