Release Notes

busybox-w32 version FRP-3812-g12e14ebba was released on 2021-01-18. It is the current release. For other release notes see:

• the release before this one
• index of all release notes

Absolute paths

Previous work standardised the location of Unix-style absolute paths (see, for example, FRP-3128). The location of such paths can now be configured by the BB_SYSTEMROOT, replacing the default use of the system drive.

• BB_SYSTEMROOT should probably only refer to a Windows-style absolute path, but this isn't checked.
• Set BB_SYSTEMROOT using the Windows Control Panel or setx, not as a shell variable: the shell itself won't see the environment variable.

Replace backslashes in output from pwd

In the last release ls was allowed to replace backslashes with forward slashes if the BB_FIX_BACKSLASH was set to 1. This wasn't made the default because output from ls isn't normalised.

In contrast directories displayed by pwd are normalised. Since there's no expectation that the format of such directories will be preserved backslashes are replaced with forward slashes unconditionally in this case.

(GitHub issue #198)

Command line editing

The following editing commands have been implemented:

    Alt-b, Alt-LeftArrow     backward word
    Alt-f, Alt-RightArrow    forward word
    Alt-BackSpace            delete word backward
    Alt-d                    delete word forward

Bug fixes

• The printf applet correctly outputs '\045' as '%'. This had been broken since FRP-3532-g01a256149. (GitHub issue #199)
• Code page translation has been extended to cover some additional cases. This means, for example, that in the approriate locales the euro symbol is correctly displayed in these cases:

  $ echo € | dos2unix
  €
  $ paste -d € file1 file2
  1€2
  

• An unexpected quirk in Windows 7 resulted in tab-completion on an empty line causing an infinite loop. A workaround has been applied. (GitHub issue #204).

Changes imported from upstream

busybox-w32 has been synchronised with upstream BusyBox. As a result the following bug fixes and enhancements are available (among many others):

• There is a new base32 applet to encode and decode base-32 formatted data.
• The [[ ]] bashism in ash has better support for &&, ||, = and =~.
• ^C in an interactive shell now breaks out of PS2 mode.
• Tab-completion ignores subdirectories when searching PATH and includes subdirectories of the current directory when a command doesn't include a slash.