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 inclu