CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosswiftprocess
Craig Otis
Craig Otis

Reputation: 32054

Executing Unix/arbitrary commands on iOS

This is not for a production application - I'm just tinkering for the fun of it (on a device, not the simulator).

Is there any mechanism for executing arbitrary binaries on iOS? Say, ls.

I've tried posix_spawn(), but it always returns a status of 1.

system() doesn't even compile, it fails with: 'system' is unavailable: not available on iOS

fork() is similarly not allowed

I realize it's a long-shot, but I have a couple (local/personal) projects that are written as pre-compiled ARM binaries and I'd love to have them available on my iPad. (Plus it's just a fun experiment.)

Sidenote: I haven't jailbroken an iOS device in years and I'm hoping to avoid it - if the above isn't possible with stock iOS, I'll just sigh and move on.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 306

Answers (1)

Andy Jazz
Andy Jazz

Reputation: 58113

There's a project called Linux shell for iOS on GitHub to get a Linux shell running on iOS, using usermode x86 emulation and syscall translation.

You'll need these things to build the project:

  • Python 3
  • Ninja
  • Yarn (only when building for iOS)
  • Meson (pip install meson)
  • Clang and LLD (on mac, brew install llvm, on linux, sudo apt install clang lld or sudo pacman -S clang lld or whatever)
  • sqlite3 (this is so common it may already be installed on linux and is definitely already installed on mac. if not, do something like sudo apt install libsqlite3-dev)

I found this GitHub link in this post.

P.S. I'm glad it's running.

enter image description here

Upvotes: 2

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