1 Please see the LICENSE file for details on copying and usage.
3 BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single
4 small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities
5 you usually find in fileutils, shellutils, findutils, textutils, grep, gzip,
6 tar, etc. BusyBox provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small or
7 embedded system. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than
8 their full featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide
9 the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts.
11 BusyBox was originally written to support the Debian Rescue/Install disks, but
12 it also makes an excellent environment for any small or embedded system.
14 BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind.
15 It is also extremely modular so you can easily include or exclude commands (or
16 features) at compile time. This makes it easy to customize your embedded
17 systems. To create a working system, just add /dev, /etc, and a kernel.
19 As of version 0.20 there is now a version number. : ) Also as of version 0.20,
20 BusyBox is now modularized to easily allow you to build only the components you
21 need, thereby reducing binary size. Run 'make config' or 'make menuconfig'
22 for select the functionality that you wish to enable.
24 After the build is complete, a busybox.links file is generated. This is
25 used by 'make install' to create symlinks to the busybox binary for all
26 compiled in functions. By default, 'make install' will place the symlink
27 forest into `pwd`/_install unless you have defined the PREFIX environment
28 variable (i.e., 'make PREFIX=/tmp/foo install')
30 If you wish to install hardlinks, rather than symlinks, you can use
31 'make install-hardlinks' instead.
35 Supported architectures:
37 Busybox in general will build on any architecture supported by gcc. It has
38 a few specialized features added for __sparc__ and __alpha__. insmod
39 functionality is currently limited to x86, ARM, SH3/4, powerpc, m68k,
44 glibc-2.0.x, glibc-2.1.x, glibc-2.2.x, glibc-2.3.x, uClibc. People
45 are looking at newlib and diet-libc, but consider them unsupported,
46 untested, or worse. Linux-libc5 is no longer supported -- you
47 should probably use uClibc instead if you want a small C library.
51 Full functionality requires Linux 2.2.x or better. A large fraction of the
52 code should run on just about anything. While the current code is fairly
53 Linux specific, it should be fairly easy to port the majority of the code
54 to, say, FreeBSD or Solaris, or MacOsX, or even Windows (if you are into that
61 When you find you need help, you can check out the BusyBox mailing list
62 archives at http://busybox.net/lists/busybox/ or even join
63 the mailing list if you are interested.
69 If you find bugs, please submit a detailed bug report to the busybox mailing
70 list at busybox@busybox.net. A well-written bug report should include a
71 transcript of a shell session that demonstrates the bad behavior and enables
72 anyone else to duplicate the bug on their own machine. The following is such
75 To: busybox@busybox.net
76 From: diligent@testing.linux.org
77 Subject: /bin/date doesn't work
82 When I execute Busybox 'date' it produces unexpected results.
83 With GNU date I get the following output:
86 Wed Mar 21 14:19:41 MST 2001
88 But when I use BusyBox date I get this instead:
93 I am using Debian unstable, kernel version 2.4.19-rmk1 on an Netwinder,
94 and the latest uClibc from CVS. Thanks for the wonderful program!
98 Note the careful description and use of examples showing not only what BusyBox
99 does, but also a counter example showing what an equivalent GNU app does. Bug
100 reports lacking such detail may never be fixed... Thanks for understanding.
106 Source for the latest released version, as well as daily snapshots, can always
108 http://busybox.net/downloads/
114 BusyBox now has its own publicly browsable CVS tree at:
115 http://busybox.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb/busybox/
117 Anonymous CVS access is available. For instructions, check out:
118 http://busybox.net/cvs_anon.html
120 For those that are actively contributing there is even CVS write access:
121 http://busybox.net/cvs_write.html
125 Please feed suggestions, bug reports, insults, and bribes back to:
127 <andersen@codepoet.org>
128 <andersen@codepoet.org>