ios-cli-tools

iOS-compatible shell + CLI util bins (bash, sh, ls, pwd, cat, etc.).

Quickstart

tar xf prebuilt.tar.gz

Will extract a precompiled sysroot to the sysroot directory.

Or, you can use compile.sh to build from scratch (described below).

What this does

This is a tiny bare-bones iOS userspace environment that depends only on libSystem.B.dylib, making it useful for running off a ramdisk (no dyld shared cache required).

• Prebuilt tools are provided in prebuilt.tar.gz.
• compile.sh builds bash, dash, and coreutils for iOS, producing the same files already in prebuilt.tar.gz.
• We provide both bash (in /bin/bash) and dash (in /bin/sh)
• bash and printf both require libiconv.2.dylib in addition to libSystem.

Build it yourself

Requirements:

• Mac + Xcode with iOS SDK (osxcross not tested)
• GNU Autotools (autoconf + automake)
• wget
• git

1. brew install autoconf automake wget
2. ./compile.sh
3. Files will be in ${PWD}/sysroot

Both the bash and dash shells are provided in /bin/bash and /bin/sh respectively.

prebuilt.tar.gz Build Environment

macOS 26.6.2 (25G83) virtual machine with Xcode 26.5 (17F42).