1 # BusyBox configuration option Help File
3 # Format of this file: description<nl>variable<nl>help text<nl><nl>.
4 # The help texts may contain empty lines, but every non-empty line must
5 # be indented two positions. Order of the help texts does not matter,
6 # however, no variable should be documented twice: if it is, only the
7 # first occurrence will be used. We try to keep the help texts of related
8 # variables close together. Lines starting with `#' are ignored. To be
9 # nice to menuconfig, limit your line length to 70 characters.
11 # Comments of the form "# Choice:" followed by a menu name are used
12 # internally by the maintainers' consistency-checking tools.
14 # If you add a help text to this file, please try to be as gentle as
15 # possible. Don't use unexplained acronyms and generally write for the
16 # hypothetical ignorant but intelligent user who has just bought a PC,
17 # removed Windows, installed Linux and is now compiling up BusyBox
18 # for the first time. Tell them what to do if they're unsure.
20 # Mention all the relevant READMEs and HOWTOs in the help text.
21 # Make them file URLs relative to the top level of the source tree so
22 # that help browsers can turn them into hotlinks. All URLs ahould be
25 # Repetitions are fine since the help texts are not meant to be read
26 # in sequence. It is good style to include URLs pointing to more
27 # detailed technical information, pictures of the hardware, etc.
29 # The most important thing to include in a help entry is *motivation*.
30 # Explain why someone configuring BusyBox might want to select your
34 Show verbose applets usage message
35 CONFIG_FEATURE_VERBOSE_USAGE
36 All BusyBox applets will show more verbose help messages when
37 busybox is invoked with --help. This will add lots of text to the
38 busybox binary. In the default configuration, this will add about
39 13k, but it can add much more depending on your configuration.
41 Enable automatic symlink creation for BusyBox built-in applets
42 CONFIG_FEATURE_INSTALLER
43 Enable 'busybox --install [-s]' support. This will allow you to use
44 busybox at runtime to create hard links or symlinks for all the
45 applets that are compiled into busybox. This feature requires the
50 Enable this if your system has locale support, and you would like
51 busybox to support locale settings.
55 Enable if you want BusyBox to work with devfs.
59 Enable if you want BusyBox to use Unix98 PTY support. If enabled,
60 busybox will use /dev/ptmx for the master side of the pseudoterminal
61 and /dev/pts/<number> for the slave side. Otherwise, BSD style
62 /dev/ttyp<number> will be used. To use this option, you should have
63 devpts or devfs mounted.
65 Clean up all memory before exiting
66 CONFIG_FEATURE_CLEAN_UP
67 As a size optimization, busybox by default does not cleanup memory
68 that is dynamically allocated or close files before exiting. This
69 saves space and is usually not needed since the OS will clean up for
70 us. Don't enable this unless you have a really good reason to clean
73 Buffers allocation policy
74 CONFIG_FEATURE_BUFFERS_USE_MALLOC
75 There are 3 ways BusyBox can handle buffer allocations:
76 - Use malloc. This costs code size for the call to xmalloc.
77 - Put them on stack. For some very small machines with limited stack
78 space, this can be deadly. For most folks, this works just fine.
79 - Put them in BSS. This works beautifully for computers with a real
80 MMU (and OS support), but wastes runtime RAM for uCLinux. This
81 behavior was the only one available for BusyBox versions 0.48 and
86 ar is an archival utility program used to create, modify, and
87 extract contents from archives. An archive is a single file holding
88 a collection of other files in a structure that makes it possible to
89 retrieve the original individual files (called archive members).
90 The original files' contents, mode (permissions), timestamp, owner,
91 and group are preserved in the archive, and can be restored on
93 On an x86 system, the ar applet adds about XXX bytes.
95 Unless you have a specific application which requires ar, you should
98 Enable the bunzip2 applet
100 bunzip2 is an compression utility using the Burrows-Wheeler block
101 sorting text compression algorithm, and Huffman coding. Compression
102 is generally considerably better than that achieved by more
103 conventional LZ77/LZ78-based compressors, and approaches the
104 performance of the PPM family of statistical compressors.
106 The BusyBox bunzip2 applet is limited to de-compression only. On an
107 x86 system, this applet adds about XXX bytes.
109 Unless you have a specific application which requires bunzip2, you
110 should probably say N here.
112 # FIXME -- document the rest of the BusyBox config options....
114 Enable the run-parts applet
116 run-parts is an utility designed to run all the scripts in a directory.
118 It is useful to set up a directory like cron.daily, where you need to
119 execute all the scripts in that directory.
121 This implementation of run-parts doesn't accept long options, and
122 some features (like report mode) aren't implemented.
124 Unless you know that run-parts is used in some of your scripts
125 you can safely say N here.
127 # The following sets edit modes for GNU EMACS
129 # case-fold-search:nil