5 BusyBox - The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux
9 BusyBox <function> [arguments...] # or
11 <function> [arguments...] # if symlinked
15 BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single
16 small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities
17 you usually find in fileutils, shellutils, findutils, textutils, grep, gzip,
18 tar, etc. BusyBox provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small
19 or embedded system. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than
20 their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide
21 the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts.
23 BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind.
24 It is also extremely modular so you can easily include or exclude commands (or
25 features) at compile time. This makes it easy to customize your embedded
26 systems. To create a working system, just add a kernel, a shell (such as ash),
27 and an editor (such as elvis-tiny or ae).
31 When you create a link to BusyBox for the function you wish to use, when BusyBox
32 is called using that link it will behave as if the command itself has been invoked.
39 will cause BusyBox to behave as 'ls' (if the 'ls' command has been compiled
42 You can also invoke BusyBox by issuing the command as an argument on the
43 command line. For example, entering
47 will also cause BusyBox to behave as 'ls'.
51 Most BusyBox commands support the B<-h> option to provide a
52 terse runtime description of their behavior.
56 Currently defined functions include:
58 addgroup, adduser, adjtimex, ar, awk, basename, busybox, cat, chgrp,
59 chmod, chown, chroot, chvt, clear, cmp, cp, cpio, crond, crontab, cut,
60 date, dc, dd, deallocvt, deluser, df, dirname, dmesg, dos2unix, dpkg,
61 dpkg-deb, du, dumpkmap, dutmp, echo, expr, false, fbset, fdflush, fdisk,
62 find, free, freeramdisk, fsck.minix, getopt, getty, grep, gunzip, gzip,
63 halt, head, hostid, hostname, id, ifconfig, init, insmod, kill, killall,
64 klogd, length, ln, loadacm, loadfont, loadkmap, logger, logname, ls, lsmod,
65 makedevs, md5sum, mkdir, mkfifo, mkfs.minix, mknod, mkswap, mktemp, more,
66 mount, mt, mv, nc, netstat, nslookup, ping, pivot_root, poweroff, printf,
67 ps, pwd, rdate, readlink, reboot, renice, reset, rm, rmdir, rmmod, route,
68 rpm2cpio, sed, setkeycodes, sh, sleep, sort, stty, swapoff, swapon, sync,
69 syslogd, tail, tar, tee, telnet, telnetd, test, tftp, time, top, touch, tr,
70 true, tty, umount, uname, uniq, unix2dos, update, uptime, usleep, uudecode,
71 uuencode, watchdog, wc, wget, which, whoami, xargs, yes, zcat, [