Tag: Busybox

BusyBox provides several stripped-down Unix tools in a single executable. It runs in a variety of POSIX environments such as Linux, Android, FreeBSD and others, such as proprietary kernels, although many of the tools it provides are designed to work with interfaces provided by the Linux kernel. It was specifically created for embedded operating systems with very limited resources. It has been self-dubbed “The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux”. It is released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
In late 2007, BusyBox also came to prominence for actively prosecuting violations of the terms of its license (the GPL) in Courts of the United States.
Originally written by Bruce Perens in 1995 and declared complete for his intended usage in 1996, BusyBox’s original purpose was to put a complete bootable system on a single floppy that would be both a rescue disk and an installer for the Debian distribution. Since that time it has been extended to become the de…