Nux Utilities is meant as a POSIX-compliant implementation of the GNU Core Utilities written in assembly language. These utilities are meant to be portable across multiple operating systems, including, but not limited to, Linux and the BSD family (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc).
The primary goal of the project, as stated above, is to provide POSIX-compliant implementations of the tools included in the GNU Core Utilities package. In addition to this goal, the following are also important:
- Learn assembly programming No reason in writing yet another implementation of the included tools if one of your goals is not learning from the experience.
- Portability across POSIX-compliant operating systems Some people do not realize that you can write portable assembly. A little more care must be taken when doing it, but this project hopes to be portable across many operation systems.
- Unobfuscated code Assembly is already harder to follow, as it is, no reason to make it even more so.
- Small footprint and fast code Assembly code is inherently faster than code written in a high-level language. However, however there are things that can be done to improve that speed, such as using the registers for temporary variables.
The project currently only supports the x86 _ 64 platform, but plans to add ports to the x86, ARM and other processor families.
The project aims to implement, at a minimum, the functionality descibed in the POSIX.1-2008 Specification.
To assemble, run:
mkdir build && cd build
../configure
make
And to install, run make install as root.
The project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0. A full copy of the license can be found in COPYING.md. If a copy of the MPL was not included with this distribution, then see https://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.