applebox

One multicall binary of Apple's own open-source command-line tools (apple-oss-distributions), built for iOS: busybox/toybox-style, the command is argv[0] (a link named after it) or the first argument (applebox echo hi). applebox --list prints the commands it carries.

It is the coreutils of the debug shell of UniXNU-droidvm, the iPadOS guest of DroidVM, beside zsh (the shell) and dropbear (the ssh server). Nothing in it is specific to that guest: the binary runs on any iOS 17 device that trusts its CDHash.

Commands

v1 takes the commands of shell_cmds (shell_cmds-216.60.1) that need libc only:

apply basename chroot dirname echo env false getopt hexdump hostname jot kill logname mktemp nice path_helper printenv printf pwd renice seq shlock sleep tee test [ true uname users what whereis which xargs yes

Left out for now: date (protocols/timed.h), id (OpenDirectory), killall (sys/user.h), nohup (vproc.h), systime (libproc.h), expr and find (yacc grammars), who and lastcomm (utmp/acct, absent on iOS).

Build

On a Mac with Xcode (the iphoneos and macOS SDKs):

python3 build.py out                                   # out/applebox, out/applebox.json
python3 build.py out --entitlements debug.plist        # signed with those entitlements

The source is downloaded from GitHub at a pinned tag and checked against its SHA-256. Each command is compiled with -Dmain=<cmd>_main and partial-linked (ld -r) exporting only _<cmd>_main, so the commands' internal globals (usage, flags, helpers whose names collide across commands) stay private to their own object; a generated dispatcher links them into one binary. It is signed ad hoc with 4 KiB pages; applebox.json records the CDHash, which the device has to trust (an owner trust cache, for UniXNU-droidvm make-owner-trust-bundle.py).

License

The build script: BSD-2-Clause-Patent (LICENSE). The commands keep the licenses of their Apple sources (BSD and APSL); they are downloaded at build time and not part of this repository.