BusyBox: A Swiss Army Knife for Linux

Linux is being used in more and more tight places—devices or situations where multiple gigabytes of storage or dozens of megabytes of RAM are simply not available. Many Linux Journal articles have addressed this growing embedded systems space. Here, I will describe a terrific open-source tool for people needing a suite of utilities for use in these tight places.

BusyBox is a single-binary application that includes the capabilities of more than 70 standard Linux utilities. The BusyBox project was started by Bruce Perens when he was leading the Debian project. Many others have contributed code since then; the project is currently maintained by Erik Andersen, who also maintains a web page for it at http://busybox.lineo.com/. (BusyBox is sponsored by embedded Linux vendor Lineo, Inc. See http://www.lineo.com/.)

The corresponding standard utilities that BusyBox replaces occupy about 1.5MB of disk space in a standard Linux system. The BusyBox program uses only 260KB of disk space; it can even be compiled to include only a handful of utilities that you select, still within a single binary. We'll see how to do this later.

Linux distributions normally include packages with many separate utilities, often in sets named textutils, shellutils or something similar. These utilities are generally very full-featured. For example, the command to list files, ls, supports over 50 command-line options. Because these utilities are so full-featured, they are sometimes larger than you might expect. For example, the ls command (dynamically linked) occupies 48KB of disk space. While you wouldn't notice that on a standard PC, many of those 50 options are just wasted space on an embedded system or boot disk. BusyBox combines numerous utilities in a single binary, limiting the features of each utility to those most commonly needed. The ls command in BusyBox has a mere 12 options—more than enough for most of us.

When you enter the name of a utility in a shell (at the Linux command line), the shell locates the binary with that name and executes it. When you install BusyBox, it creates links in your file system so that instead of having a real ls command, you have a symbolic link named “ls” that refers to the BusyBox binary. A directory listing of ls would then appear like this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 nwells users 12 May 17 14:47 ls ->/bin/busybox

Typing ls at the command prompt causes the shell to launch the BusyBox program, which in turn examines the name under which you invoked it. Seeing that you entered ls in this example, the BusyBox program proceeds to act like ls, interpreting any additional options according to that command.

If this talk about 70 utilities in one is making you curious, here are a few samples of what BusyBox includes. The web site given above has a complete list with documentation:

Many of these utilities are reduced versions to fit in the 260KB total space mentioned above. For example, the sh shell doesn't support if/then/else statements or while loops, but it has enough built-in commands to handle simple startup shell scripts. Also, commands like init and tar have greatly reduced functionality, but they are sufficient to get the job done for many applications where you don't have space for the full-blown utility.

Adding BusyBox to your system is simple. First, obtain the source code by visiting ftp.lineo.com/pub/busybox and downloading the most recent version of the compressed tar file. As of this writing, the most recent version is the file busybox-0.45.tar.gz, but newer versions will probably be available by the time you read this. Work on BusyBox seems to progress at a steady pace.

After you've downloaded the tar file, place it in a working directory and use this command to untar the file:

tar xvzf busybox-0.45.tar.gz

Change to the newly created busybox directory (I write the name in lowercase this time to match the binary name) and enter the make command:

cd busybox-0.45
make

 ./busybox ls

 ./busybox lsmod

Another important feature of BusyBox is that you can see a small on-line help screen for each utility that BusyBox replaces. Just use the --help option with the command. For example, to learn about the ls options that BusyBox supports, enter ./busybox ls --help

This displays the following help text:

BusyBox v0.45 (2000.05.17-20:38+0000) multi-call
binary -- GPL2
Usage: ls [-1acdelnpuxACF] [filenames...]
Options:
-a      do not hide entries starting with .
-c      with -l: show ctime (the time of last
        modification of file status information)
-d      list directory entries instead of contents
-e      list both full date and full time
-l      use a long listing format
-n      list numeric UIDs and GIDs instead of names
-p      append indicator (one of /=@|) to entries
-u      with -l: show access time (the time of last
        access of the file)
-x      list entries by lines instead of by columns
-A      do not list implied . and ..
-C      list entries by columns
-F      append indicator (one of */=@|) to entries