Heirloom Project 📖 Wikipedia

The Heirloom Project is a collection of traditional Unix utilities. Most of them are derived from original Unix source code, as released as open-source by Caldera and Sun.^[1]

The project has the following components:

• The Heirloom Toolchest: awk, cpio, grep, tar, pax, etc.
• The Heirloom Bourne Shell sh
• The Heirloom Documentation Tools: nroff, troff, dpost, etc.
• The Heirloom Development Tools: lex, yacc, m4, and SCCS
• Heirloom mailx
• The Heirloom Packaging Tools: pkgadd, pkgmk, etc.

Although in general the intention of the project is to provide versions of Unix programs whose behavior mimics that of the classic versions, some improvements have been made. In particular, many of the Heirloom programs have been adapted to handle UTF-8 Unicode. Most programs have both a classic version and a POSIX conformant variant.^[1]

Heirloom Toolchest New Generation, or heirloom-ng, is a fork^[1] derived from the latest stable release of the Heirloom Toolchest, created by the Pindorama project. It incorporates changes made after the last formal release of Heirloom Toolchest,^[2] along with new implementations or ports for a handful of utilities that are expected to be present in new systems and/or enhance user experience, maintaining the same discipline present in the original project^[3] and modernization in parts of the source code,^[4] with older utilities receiving occasional maintenance when necessary. It is actively used by the Copacabana Linux distribution, as integral part of its userspace, but it is also supported on many UNIX-compatible operating systems.^[5] As of April 2024, a test suite proposal was put en route to a new version,^[6] but it has been severely delayed because of the massiveness of test cases along with insufficient labor force for completing it in time for the release made in February 20, 2025; it may not be source of preoccupation regarding the project's maintaining status since it is not an essential component of the project, but an "extra" for ensuring that porting efforts can be made considerably less laborious.

• Heirloom Project on SourceForge
• Mac OS X port
• Retrocomputing Museum entry
• GNU Autoconf manual: Systemology
• heirloom-mailx package - Debian
• The Heirloom Documentation Tools on GitHub
• heirloom-ng fork on GitHub