intro(1)
MILESTONE-QUALIFIED
Rendered from the page's mdoc source at milestone/general-usability-qemu-20260927 (platform ff025b1)
with GNU groff version 1.23.0, using the same command the image build uses; an ABSD session running
man 1 intro prints this text. It is dated 2026-09-27; the build commands and
repository files it mentions are in private sources, and later work is not in it.
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INTRO(1) General Commands Manual INTRO(1) NAME intro -- introduction to ABSD and its commands DESCRIPTION You are in a session on ABSD, a small x86-64 operating system. The session is an SSH connection to sshd, the SSH server, which started absd-sh(1) for you (or, for `ssh host command', started that one command directly). Everything you read or write goes through one file server; see filesystem(7). ABSD is not a Unix. Programs are started, never forked; a process holds handles with rights instead of file descriptors and user IDs; there are no signals, no users, and no permission bits. The session is a single operator identity whose authority is fixed by sshd when the session starts; everything the session runs has that authority or less. See process(7) and handles(7). Start with afterboot(8). Commands under /bin A bare command name runs /bin/name. There is no PATH. The platform's own programs: cat copy files, or standard input, to standard output cp copy files and directories (-r) date the date and time, UTC; see date(1) df filesystem space, and this session's mounts echo print arguments head first lines or bytes of files ls list directories; -l adds kind, read-only flag, links, and size man print a manual page; see man(1) mkdir make directories (-p) mv rename, in one filesystem commit printenv print the environment (empty in an SSH session) pwd print the working directory rm remove files and directories (-r) sha256sum SHA-256 of files, or check a list (-c) stat what the filesystem records about an object sync commit everything the file server has accepted tail last lines or bytes of files uname system name uptime time since boot, and this boot's identity; see uptime(1) wc line, word, and byte counts Unmodified uutils 0.12.0 programs, built from their published sources: basename, base64, cut, fold, nl, seq, and uniq. They behave as on Linux. Each is 0.5 to 1.5 MB, and a program is read whole through the file server before it starts, so they start more slowly than the native commands. man has pages only for the topics listed under "SEE ALSO"; there are no per-command pages yet. Deliberately absent These are not missing by accident; each would need a mechanism or an authority decision ABSD does not have: o kill, top, a /bin/ps: a process can see only itself and its own children; the shell's ps(1) builtin asks sshd for this session's processes only. o chmod, chown, touch, ln: there are no owners, modes, timestamps, or links. o syslogd, cron, /etc/rc.d: each program that logs writes its own file under /var/log; nothing runs on a schedule; the boot starts a fixed set of programs. o mount: a session's mounts are fixed by sshd. o Users, logins, and su: one operator identity; multi-session is not multi-user. o fork, exec, signals, job control, process groups: see process(7). There is no text editor and no pager. Write files with echo and `>', or with cp; read long output a part at a time with head and tail. Copying files There is no scp or sftp (the SSH server has no subsystems). Copy with a command and redirection instead, from the host: $ ssh -p 2222 operator@127.0.0.1 'cat > /home/operator/f' < f $ ssh -p 2222 operator@127.0.0.1 cat /home/operator/f > f Both are byte-exact for any file (binary included), as long as no terminal is requested (no -t). See afterboot(8). QUALIFICATION What these pages describe is the qualified system: the ABSD kernel's `net fsd' durable boot under QEMU (x86-64, TCG, `-cpu max,vendor=GenuineIntel,+rdrand', one e1000 network card, one IDE disk image) running the file server absd-fsd and sshd, reached from the host with OpenSSH. The platform's scripts/check-all.sh qualifies it. No ABSD boot has run on physical hardware. The operator image is built and booted by the platform's scripts/build-operator-image.sh and scripts/boot-operator.sh; see afterboot(8). SEE ALSO absd-sh(1), date(1), man(1), ps(1), uptime(1), ata(4), e1000(4), nvme(4), network.conf(5), sshd.conf(5), filesystem(7), handles(7), process(7), afterboot(8), shutdown(8) ABSD September 27, 2026 INTRO(1)