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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 a kernel, a shell (such as ash), and an editor (such as elvis-tiny or ae). For a really minimal system, just the the busybox shell (not a POSIX shell, but very small and quite usable).

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

NEW!

BusyBox now has a mailing list! To subscribe, go and visit this page.
Latest News

  • 13 December 2000 -- BusyBox 0.48 released
    This release fixes lots and lots of bugs. This has had some very rigorous testing, and looks very, very clean. The usual tar update of course: tar no longer breaks hardlinks, tar -xzf is optionally supported, and the LRP folks will be pleased to know that 'tar -X' and 'tar --exclude' are both now in. Applets are now looked up using a binary search making lash (the busybox shell) much faster. For the new debian-installer (for Debian woody) a .udeb can now be generated.

    The curious can get a list of some of the more interesting changes by reading the changelog.

    Many thanks go out to the many many people that have contributed to this release, especially Matt Kraai, Larry Doolittle, and Kent Robotti.

  • 26 September 2000 -- BusyBox 0.47 released
    This release fixes lots of bugs (including an ugly bug in 0.46 syslogd that could fork-bomb your system). Added several new apps: rdate, wget, getopt, dos2unix, unix2dos, reset, unrpm, renice, xargs, and expr. syslogd now supports network logging. There are the usual tar updates. Most apps now use getopt for more correct option parsing. See the changelog for complete details.

  • 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.
  • BusyBox.pdf. This is basically the same document, but in pdf format.
  • README. This is the README file included in the busybox source release.
  • BusyBoxBugs. 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, Erik Andersen. 		This site created with the vi editor Graphics by GIMP Linux Today

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