This is Chimera Linux's core userland. It consists of the following:

• Ports of FreeBSD tools
• An internal library providing a compat interface to simplify porting
• Custom-made new tools
• A Meson-based build system

It replaces the following GNU projects:

• coreutils
• findutils
• diffutils
• sharutils
• grep
• sed
• ed
• m4
• patch
• gzip
• gawk
• bc (optional, bc-gh is recommended now)

It also provides the following functionality:

• tip/cu
• telnet
• fetch
• vi
• sh
• vis
• unvis
• compress
• uncompress
• portions of util-linux
• and additional custom tools

In a way, chimerautils is also an alternative to projects like Busybox.

This project is a fork of bsdutils by David Cantrell. Chimerautils were created in order to provide a more complete package that prioritizes Chimera's needs and development pace.

Chimerautils requires a Linux system with a Clang or GCC compiler.

You will also need the following:

• meson and ninja
• flex (or another lex)
• byacc (or bison)
• libxo (https://github.com/Juniper/libxo)

Optionally, these are also needed:

• ncurses or another provider of terminfo (for color ls(1) and others)
• libedit (for bc and line editing in sh)
• libcrypto from OpenSSL or LibreSSL (for dc, install and optionally sort)

If your C library does not provide them, you will need these:

• libfts
• librpmatch

To build:

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ meson ..
$ ninja all

When a new release of FreeBSD is made, the import-src.sh script should be used to update the source tree. First edit upstream.conf and then run the import-src.sh script. The script will fetch the new release source and copy in the source for the commands we have. Any patches in patches/ will be applied. These may need updating between releases, so keep that in mind. The workflow is basically:

1. Change VER in upstream.conf

2. Verify URL in upstream.conf works (FreeBSD may move things around).

3. Run ./import-src.sh. It is adviseable to capture stdout and stderr to see what patches fail to apply. Any that fail, you want to manually fix and then run import-src.sh again to get a clean import of the version you are updating to.

4. Now build all the commands and fix any new build errors.

Once this is clean, you can commit the import of the new version of FreeBSD code. The import-src.sh and patches step is meant to make it more clear what changes I apply to FreeBSD code from release to release and also if any external projects want to use these patches and the FreeBSD source directly.