BUSYBOX
BusyBox

Please visit our sponsors and thank them for their support! They have provided money for equipment and bandwidth. Next time you need help with a project, consider these fine companies! Several individuals have also contributed. If you have already contributed and would like your name added here, just let me know. If you would like to be a BusyBox sponsor, email Erik.

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 /dev, /etc, and a kernel.

BusyBox is maintained by Erik Andersen, and licensed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.

Screenshot

Because everybody loves screenshots, a screenshot of BusyBox is now available right here.

Mailing List Information

BusyBox now has a mailing list!
To subscribe, go and visit this page.
Latest News
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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.
  • README. This is the README file included in the busybox source release.
  • BusyBox Bugs. 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
  • Free Software from Bruce Perens
    The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written by Bruce Perens. This is his BusyBox website.
  • Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox
  • TinyLogin is a nice embedded tool for handling authentication, changing passwords, and similar tasks which nicely complements BusyBox.
  • udhcp is a tiny dhcp client and/or server which is ideal for embedded systems.
  • uClibc is a C library for embedded systems. You can actually statically link a "Hello World" application under x86 that only takes 4k (as opposed to 200k under GNU libc). It can do dynamic linking too and works nicely with BusyBox to create very small embedded systems.
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:

  • Sharp Zaurus PDA

    • 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
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