[Toybox] interesting new (?) env(1) options

[enh]

On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 3:43 PM Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:

> On 3/15/24 16:27, enh wrote:
> >     That said, I'm not implementing --longopts without a short opt until
> somebody
> >     comes to me with a use case. And then I would come up with short
> options. Also,
> >     "env" is probably the wrong place to put this unless it's also going
> to sprout
> >     flags to change niceness level and so on: man 7 signal and man 7
> environ are
> >     different pages.
> >
> > i know what you mean, but at the same time, the fact that this swiss
> army knife
> > doesn't actually exist is a bug in its own right.
>
> A swiss army knife tool is not unix. Unix is "do one thing and do it
> well", and
> then combine them either with pipes or via:
>
>   nice -n 20 env -i potato=wombat nohup nsenter -m chroot thingy /bin/blah
>
> Having a "sigfilt -INT +HUP cat /proc/potato" in a list like that doesn't
> seem
> like a big lift. (Recycling the "kill" plumbing to understand signal
> names, and
> the -block +unblock stuff from shell options, maybe with the magic name ALL
> being every signal. Seems like it might also want a taskset/chmod style
> set/unset mask, but I'd want to think about that? Or wait for somebody to
> actually need it, since +ALL and -ALL seem like the default use cases...)
>
> If you were going to extend any of the existing commands above to fiddle
> with
> more signals, "nohup" would be the obvious choice, not "env". (Modulo the
> silly
> stdin/stdout redirection nohup does.)
>
> > i regularly find people who
> > don't realize which of these things there is/isn't a command for.
> (because not
> > only are they separate commands, even the man pages don't generally
> refer to one
> > another. because, like you say, in a sense they _don't_ have anything
> much to do
> > with one another.)
>
> Back in college they had xerox pages with one line summaries of commands,
> which
> you could "man command" on the machine for.
>

i remember when apropros(1) was useful...

~$ apropos nice
nice: nothing appropriate.
~$

:-(

For a while https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/dir_section_1.html and friends
> were
> useful but then he dumped 8 zillion unrelated packages into them,
> reproducing
> Yogi Bera's "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". (I mean
> seriously,
> linking to https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/pmdasolaris.1.html and
> https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/ibv_srq_pingpong.1.html in the
> first page
> of results does NOT help anyone do anything, ever.)
>
> My contribution to that was https://landley.net/toybox/help.html and an
> intention to do videos (which got hung up on prudetube imploding, but I
> should
> get on with it anyway).
>
> In theory "toybox help -au" provides a similar "one line per command"
> list, but
> that has option usage instead of a brief summary of what the command DOES.
> There
> _is_ such a brief summary for most commands at the top of each source
> file, ala:
>
> $ sed -ns '1p' toys/*/*.c | head -n 10
> /* getenforce.c - Get the current SELinux mode
> /* load_policy.c - Load an SELinux policy file
> /* log.c - Log to logcat.
> /* restorecon.c - Restore default security contexts for files
> /* runcon.c - Run command in specified security context
> /* sendevent.c - Send Linux input events.
> /* setenforce.c - Set the current SELinux mode
> /* demo_many_options.c - test more than 32 bits worth of option flags
> /* demo_number.c - Expose atolx() and human_readable() for testing.
> /* demo_scankey.c - collate incoming ansi escape sequences.
>
> But that doesn't become part of the help text (maybe it should?) and
> doesn't
> cover multiple commands in the same source file. And xzcat.c does it wrong.
>
> Anyway: if a "toybox cheat sheet" seems like a good thing, we're like 80%
> of the
> way there already?
>

maybe a toybox apropros(1)?

(although my `apropos nice` example is a bad one because renice(1) has no
description.)


> Rob
>
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