sysbox

Yes, I first learned this and the name "splay" from CFengine, back in the day. I put together a small busybox-like collection of sysadmin tools, and one of the subcommands is "splay" to sleep for a random amount of time. It's one of those things that is useful surprisingly often, even outside cron. https://github.com/skx/sysbox

I remember in 1999 there was a project to reimplement a bunch of these tools in perl: https://perlpowertools.com/ I even contributed a little, back then. I guess writing basic versions of "ls", for example, is trivial. But there's a lot of work getting all the tools done, with all the flags implemented and behaving as expected. I guess there are tools like busybox, toybox, and similar, which also implement a lot of "stuff" to varying degrees of completion. From my side the biggest takeaway from those projects is the sheer convenience of deploying a single binary and installing symlinks to change functionality. I replicated something similar with my sysbox project, collecting tools together in one golang binary with various subcommands: https://github.com/skx/sysbox I use at least one of those tools on a daily basis, though I suspect the