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

The Bonsai core utilities are a replacement for standard POSIX utilities which
aim to fill its niche while expanding on their capabilities. These new tools are
the result of the careful examination of the current state of POSIX and Unix
utilies. The Unix Philosophy of “do one thing and do it well” are their core but
they avoid clinging to the past.

The era of the original Unix tools has been long and fruitful, but they have
their flaws. The new, non-POSIX era of this project started with frustration
with the way certain tools work and how other projects that extend POSIX don’t
make anything better.

This project will not follow in the footsteps of GNU; extensions of POSIX will
not be found here. GNU extensions are a gateway to the misuse of the shell. The
Bonsai core utilities will intentionally discourage use of the shell for
purposes beyond its scope.

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

Building

The coreutils 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>

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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/>.