Busybox

Available from http://www.busybox.net/.

  • Originally written by Bruce Perens to form part of early Debian bootdisks.

  • Nowadays mostly maintained by Erik Andersen. Has a very active mailing list and small and large contributions from dozens of people.

  • One binary whose behaviour is determined by the name by which it is invoked.

    • Call it as ls, it lists files.

    • Call it as tar, it manages archives.

    One binary is installed and lots of links made.

  • Extensive customisation of build process is easy. Uses 2.4 kernel build system (make menuconfig). Only build in the functionality you required.

  • Savings are made by not duplicating support functionality. This is all in the statically linked libbb and failing to use a function in there when appropriate is a Bad Thing!