“Seek not to walk the path of the masters; seek what they sought.”
– Matsuo Basho

The Bonsai harakit is an alternative to the standard POSIX utility set that
aims to be simpler, easier, and more powerful than its counterpart. These tools
are the result of careful examination of the current state of POSIX and common
Unix utilities. They represent a vision of accomplishing everyday use cases
with tools that follow the Unix philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”,
without clinging to the past.

The era of the original Unix tools has been long and fruitful, but they have
their flaws. This project originated from frustrations with the way certain
tools work and how other projects that extend POSIX don’t make anything better.

The intent of harakit is not to conform to or extend POSIX, like the GNU or BSD
utilities, but to invent new utilities to perform the same tasks in more
intuitive ways. GNU and BSD extensions are convenient but often unhealthy,
forgetting the purposes of the tools they extend, or building into existing
utilities features that would be more useful as their own tools to be used
anywhere. Whereas other utility sets aim to provide a number of fully-featured
programs to be used individually, harakit tools are meant to be easily
composable and work together in pipelines.

See docs/ for more on the specific utilities currently implemented.


Building

Harakit utilities require a POSIX-compliant environment to compile, including a
C compiler and preprocessor (cc(1) and cpp(1) by default), an edition 2023 Rust
compiler (rustc(1) by default), bindgen(1), and a POSIX-compliant make(1)
utility.

To build and install:

$ make
$ make PREFIX="/your/preferred/location" install

To build with a different compiler than the default:

$ make CC=clang
$ make RUSTC=gccrs

To test the utilities:

$ make test

To remove all build and distributable files:

$ make clean


Read More

An Introduction to the Unix Shell
<https://porkmail.org/era/unix/shell>

Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines
<http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.html>

Master Foo Discourses on the Unix-Nature
<http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/unix-nature.html>

Shell Programming!
<https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/why-shell.html>

UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful
<http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/>


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Copyright © 2023–2024 Emma Tebibyte <emma@tebibyte.media>
Copyright © 2024 DTB <trinity@trinity.moe>

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/>.