Don’t forget Busybox is installed!

[Member PDP-8]

Do you miss things like the rpn desk-calculator “dc” at the commandline? Or perhaps want to use a less bloated vi editor without having to download anything?

Busybox to the rescue. Busybox is basically a single 1m or so executable that can emulate many commands depending on how it is called. An older version is already on board.

For example, if you want to run the rpn calculator, you can do so like this:

busybox dc

But what if you don’t want to type busybox all the time? You can create a softlink to it:

ln -s /usr/bin/busybox dc

Now dc appears as a softlink in your working directory, and if you execute it, it will bring up dc.

Likewise for a very small vi editor. Just follow the same example. To see ALL the commands that are compiled into the busybox executable itself, just type busybox by itself and you will see all the commands the developer / distributor enabled.

This isn’t meant to be a concise treatise on busybox, but if you want to use the latest, you can download the source and compile it, or perhaps cherry pick single commands, or the latest busybox binary from:

https://www.busybox.net/

While I’m not skilled enough to do so, someday my wish would be to see a “busybox” version of Anti-X, using the latest versions, to see if it would further reduce ram requirements, especially for those older low-spec 32 bit machines, since BB ash shell at the commandline is good enough for my uses. I could add bash/coreutils/fileutils later if I absolutely wanted. Maybe Santa is a busybox user. 🙂

[Member LikkMii]

Helpful

Up

0

::

Coolness !

[Member PDP-8]

Helpful

Up

0

::

Lots of little goodies in there. So it’s not just for total crash recovery, although some see it that way.

Some of my favorites are
unix2dos
dos2unix

And if your box still has a need to connect via rs-232 serial ports for some reason, theres always microcom for a quick fix.

Heh, that’s the first thing I always check on with most distros – what busybox version (if any) they have on board, which apps they compiled in, and also how old it is – which may necessitate a manual upgrade on my part.

[Author]

Posts