What is busybox?

BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable.

Use cases:

It provides replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in linux and unix systems. One can extremely customize the commands on needs.

In any Linux embedded system if you try to list out /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin you will see as below.

ls -l /bin /sbin /usr/bin (manually typed sample to demo ). More than 90% of the commands are just a link to busybox. And busybox source the functionalities.

1. cat -> /bin/busybox 
2. ls -> /bin/busybox 
3. insmod -> /bin/busybox 
4. cp -> /bin/busybox 
5. mov -> /bin/busybox 
6. rm -> /bin/busybox 
7. dd -> /bin/busybox 
8. grep -> /bin/busybox 
9. sed -> /bin/busybox 
10. mkdir -> /bin/busybox 
11. touch -> /bin/busybox 

BusyBox provides a fairly complete environment for any small or embedded system.

BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind.

In few hundred kb size file, one could get huge list of functionalities on the system.