BusyBox

From Free net encyclopedia

In computing, BusyBox is a program combining many standard Unix utilities into a single small executable. It can provide most of the utilities specified in the Single Unix Specification plus many other utilities a user would expect to see on a GNU/Linux system. BusyBox is typically used in a single-floppy or embedded Linux system because of its small size, although it has also been used in the distributions of Linux for the Sharp Zaurus and the Nokia 770. It is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL.

According to the project home page, BusyBox is "The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux", and is often paired with uClibc for embedded Linuxes.

Originally written by Bruce Perens in 1996, the intent of Busybox was to put a complete bootable system on a single floppy that would be both a rescue disk and an installer for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. It has since then become the De facto standard for Embedded Linux devices and Linux distribution installers. Since each Linux executable requires several KB of overhead, having the BusyBox program combined over two hundred programs together can save considerable space.

Erik Andersen was the offical maintainer between the year 2000(?) and March 2006, during this time busybox matured greatly, expanding both its userbase and functionality.

Rob Landley is currently the official maintainer of busybox.


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Examples

Programs included in BusyBox can be run simply by adding their name as an argument when running the program as seen here.

/bin/busybox ls

More commonly, the BusyBox executable is linked to (using hard or symbolic links) the desired command names; BusyBox notices the name it is called as, and runs the appropriate command, for example just

/bin/ls

after /bin/ls is linked to /bin/busybox.

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External links

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