How to run GNU utilities without root? Is there any way to use GNU utilities like GNU's sed, find, bash, and awk WITHOUT root? Android's utilities that are provided by toolbox and the BusyBox applets provided by one particular application I have installed lack the kind of features necessary for them to be fully functional. 

One problem I have in particular is that I have no way of converting characters that hinder processing data in a Unix environment (such as linefeeds and nulls) into their respective escape codes (i.e., a linefeed becomes \n, a null becomes \x00 or \0, etc.). 

I am running Android 4.4.
Try out Termux! (Note: I'm not affliated with it or its author)

Termux provides a full set of common Linux CLI tools like GNU coreutils, binutils, and popular software like imagemagick, ffmpeg, as well as development environment like Clang, Python and Ruby. Other nice gadgets also include Vim, Emacs, tmux, htop, etc.

All available without root.


Image from Google Play details page