/syscoretools

Implementation of small subset of the classic shell utilities (a.k.a. coreutils)

Primary LanguageNimMIT LicenseMIT

System Core Tools

Description

SysCoreTools is an attmpt to implement a small subset of the tools as defined in the The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, Shell and Utilities, similar to the GNU Coreutils, albeit not so elaborated.

Goals

  • Expose the useful functionalities of some of the classic Shell Utilities invaluable on any *NIX platform, to Windows. Although testing is performed on other platforms (i.e. Mac, Linux), in an effort to be mostly platform agnostic, the main target remains Windows.
  • Generate small native and possibly fast executables to ease distribution and user experience.
  • As a side effect, learn the Nim programming language (http://nim-lang.org/)

Similar Projects

Build All

  • Install Nim, available at http://nim-lang.org/
  • Clone the SysCoreTools repository: git clone https://github.com/andreburgaud/syscoretools
  • In the syscoretools root directory, use project.nims (nimscript), as follow:
$ nim release project
  • The executable(s) will be compiled and copied in the dist subdirectory

Compile and Run Individual Tools

This approach is useful when working on a particular tool, by avoiding to build everything available in the src directory.

Example with wc (word count):

> cd src
> nim c wc.nim

The executable will be generated in the same directory (src)

or in release mode:

> cd src
> nim -d:release c wc.nim

If you have strip (from mingw64) available in your path, you can further reduce the size of the executable with the following command, on Windows:

> strip wc.exe

or on a *NIX variant:

$ strip wc

To run the executable:

> wc --help

Tests

Some basic unit tests can be executed with:

> nim test project

Other Available Build Tasks

To list other build tasks available, execute: nim help project

$ nim help project
version              Show project version and Nim compiler version
test                 Runs the test suite
release              Compile syscoretools in release mode
build                Compile syscoretools in debug mode
clean                Delete generated binaries

Tools and Version

  • SysCoreTools 0.2.0
    • wc 0.2.0
    • uniq 0.1.0

SysCoreToolsRelease Notes

  • Version 0.2.0 (01/10/2017):

    • Replaced parseopt with parseopt3 to be POSIX compliant (option with space separator)
    • Added uniq

  • Version 0.1.1 (01/10/2017):

    • Replaced nimble with a basic nimscript
    • Removed dependency on package strfmt

  • Version 0.1.0 (01/9/2017):

    • First release
    • Built with Nim 0.16.0
    • Tool available: wc version 0.1.0

Legal

System Core Tools is distributed under the MIT License: see included License file.

To be respectful of the license, I have no knowledge of and don't look at the code of any of the GNU coreutils implementation released under one of the GPL family licenses. But, I may compare the results of the GNU tools execution to validate progress with comparable tools in SysCoreTools.

The help displayed for the each tool may include portion of the documentation copied from the corresponding tool in the BSD General Command Manual. The FreeBSD Documentation License is available at the following link: https://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-doc-license.html.

Since version 0.2.0, to handle the command line options and arguments, SysCoreTools uses parseopt3 from the cligen project available at https://github.com/c-blake/cligen. The cligen project is released under the ISC license.

Resources