BusyBox

B u s y B o x

The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux

BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in fileutils, shellutils, findutils, textutils, grep, gzip, tar, etc. BusyBox provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small or embedded system. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts.

BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind. It is also extremely modular so you can easily include or exclude commands (or features) at compile time. This makes it easy to customize your embedded systems. To create a working system, just add /dev, a kernel, and an editor, such as nano, e3, or elvis-tiny. For a really minimal system, you can even use the busybox shell (not Bourne compatible, but very small and quite usable).

BusyBox is now maintained by Erik Andersen, and its ongoing development is being sponsored by Lineo.

BusyBox is licensed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE

Screenshot

Because everybody loves screenshots, a screenshot of BusyBox is now available right here

Mailing List Information

BusyBox now has a mailing list! To subscribe, go and visit this page.

Latest News

27 January 2001 -- BusyBox 0.49 released
Several new applets, lots of bug fixes, cleanups, and many smaller things made nicer. Several cleanups and improvements to the shell. For a list of the most interesting changes you might want to look at the changelog.
Special thanks go out to Matt Kraai and Larry Doolittle for all their work on this release, and for keeping on top of things while I've been out of town.
Special Note
BusyBox 0.49 was supposed to have replaced lash, the BusyBox shell, with a new shell that understands full Bourne shell/Posix shell grammer. Well, that simply didn't happen in time for this release. A new shell that will eventually replace lash is already under construction. This new shell is being developed by Larry Doolittle, and could use all of our help. Please see the work in progress on Larry's website and help out if you can. This shell will be included in the next release of BusyBox.
13 December 2000 -- BusyBox 0.48 released
This release fixes lots and lots of bugs. This has had some very rigorous testing, and looks very, very clean. The usual tar update of course: tar no longer breaks hardlinks, tar -xzf is optionally supported, and the LRP folks will be pleased to know that 'tar -X' and 'tar --exclude' are both now in. Applets are now looked up using a binary search making lash (the busybox shell) much faster. For the new debian-installer (for Debian woody) a .udeb can now be generated.
The curious can get a list of some of the more interesting changes by reading the changelog.
Many thanks go out to the many many people that have contributed to this release, especially Matt Kraai, Larry Doolittle, and Kent Robotti.
Old News
For the old news, visit the old news page.

Download

Source for the latest release can always be downloaded from ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.
A new snapshot of the source is made daily and is available as a GNU gzipped tarball right here.
BusyBox now has its own publically browsable CVS tree, anonymous CVS access, and for those that are actively contributing there is even CVS write access.

Documentation

Current documentation for BusyBox includes:

BusyBox.html. This is a list of the all the available commands in BusyBox with complete usage information and examples of how to use each app. I have spent a lot of time updating these docs and trying to make them fairly comprehensive. If you find any errors (factual, grammatical, whatever) please let me know.
BusyBox.pdf. This is basically the same document, but in pdf format.
README. This is the README file included in the busybox source release.
BusyBoxBugs. Need to report a bug? Need to check if a bug has been filed?
If you need more help, the BusyBox mailing list is a good place to start.

Important Links

Free Software from Bruce Perens
The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written by Bruce Perens. This is his BusyBox website.
Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox
Other cool embedded software.
opensource.lineo.com.
Lineo is sponsoring BusyBox development.

Products/Projects Using BusyBox

I know of the following products and/or projects that use BusyBox -- listed in the order I happen to add them to the web page:

Do you use BusyBox? I'd love to know about it and I'd be happy to link to you.

Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to Erik Andersen
The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000, Erik Andersen.