For JRuby, we've been using JNA to wire up a number of libc/POSIX functions that Java just doesn't support. And in order to make that work reusable, Tom Enebo has made it into a mostly standalone library.

http://svn.codehaus.org/jruby/trunk/jruby/src/org/jruby/ext/posix/

We're looking at getting this released independent of JRuby in the near future. Currently it supports only the functions we were most interested in for JRuby. There's a lot of symlink stuff, file stat, passwd, and a few other pieces. We've got it all basically working through JNA on Linux, Linux x64, Windows, Solaris x86, and Mac OS X x86. Of course we'd like support for other platforms, but this has mostly been Tom doing the work. Hence my email.

I know there's been a desire for such a generic library to wrap the POSIX functions we don't have available on Java. I think this library could evolve into exactly what folks have been looking for.

So hey, take a look, offer comments and suggestions, and submit patches. Once we get it spun off as a separate project, we can talk about opening it up for committers and all. Because I think it's that really needs to be done, and done right, on a lot of platforms.