mksh — The iShell

Thanks to help from people in the various IRC channels, and gecko2@ jailbreaking his iPhone 3G (not G3…), I was able to run (albeit not test — there is no Perl for the iPhone yet) two mksh(1) binaries on it: a normal one and a fat binary (aka universal binary — this one, containing code for 5 (five) architectures, can truly be called an universal binary ☺).

I packaged the modified build script, an extra ldid binary (built for OSX86) provided by someone else, and the output of the build process, together with a readme, as a gzsig(1)ned tarball on our server again — note that the cryptographic signature is only for time stamping (and download integrity checking) and does not imply any warranties, especially for the third-party software involved.

While here, we would be pleased if the reader supports our proposal and requests Apple to include mksh in the default installations. We would also be pleased if the mksh-iPhone binary were to make it into one of the Cydia repositories, contact us via IRC or mailing lists for assistance.

If someone were to package Perl 5.8 or so, that’d be great too.

To the readers from ##iphone-hackers on the one and #iphone-dev on the other IRC network: *waves a friendly hello*