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BusyBox
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 a shell. For a really minimal system, you can even use the busybox shell (not Bourne compatible, but very small and quite usable), and the busybox vi editor.

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
  • 7 July 2001 -- BusyBox 0.52 released
    I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of BusyBox 0.52 (the "new-and-improved rock-solid release"). This release is the result of many hours of work and has tons of bugfixes, optimizations, and cleanups. This release adds several new applets, including several new shells (such as hush, msh, and ash).

    The changelog covers some of the more obvious details, but there are many many things that are not mentioned, but have been improved in subtle ways. As usual, BusyBox 0.52 can be downloaded from ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.

    Have Fun!

  • 10 April 2001 - Graph of Busybox Growth
    The illustrious Larry Doolittle has made a PostScript chart of the growth of the Busybox tarball size over time. It is available for downloading / viewing right here.

    (Note that while the number of applets in Busybox has increased, you can still configure Busybox to be as small as you want by selectively turning off whichever applets you don't need.)

  • 10 April 2001 -- BusyBox 0.51 released
    BusyBox 0.51 (the "rock-solid release") is now out there. This release adds only 2 new applets: env and vi. The vi applet, contributed by Sterling Huxley, is very functional, and is only 22k. This release fixes 3 critical bugs in the 0.50 release. There were 2 potential segfaults in lash (the busybox shell) in the 0.50 release which are now fixed. Another critical bug in 0.50 which is now fixed: syslogd from 0.50 could potentially deadlock the init process and thereby break your entire system.

    There are a number of improvements in this release as well. For one thing, the wget applet is greatly improved. Dmitry Zakharov added FTP support, and Laurence Anderson make wget fully RFC compliant for HTTP 1.1. The mechanism for including utility functions in previous releases was clumsy and error prone. Now all utility functions are part of a new libbb library, which makes maintaining utility functions much simpler. And BusyBox now compiles on itanium systems (thanks to the Debian itanium porters for letting me use their system!).

    You can read the changelog for complete details. BusyBox 0.51 can be downloaded from ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.

    Have Fun!

  • Busybox Boot-Floppy Image

    Because you asked for it, we have made available a Busybox boot floppy image. Here's how you use it:

    1. Download the image
    2. dd it onto a floppy like so: dd if=busybox.floppy.img of=/dev/fd0 ; sync
    3. Pop it in a machine and boot up.

    If you want to look at the contents of the initrd image, do this:

    	    mount ./busybox.floppy.img /mnt -o loop -t msdos        
    	    cp /mnt/initrd.gz /tmp                          
    	    umount /mnt           
    	    gunzip /tmp/initrd.gz
    	    mount /tmp/initrd /mnt -o loop -t minix
        
  • Old News
    For the old news, visit the old news page.
Download
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.
  • README. This is the README file included in the busybox source release.
  • BusyBox Bugs. 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
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 1999,2000,2001, Erik Andersen.
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