BusyBox to the rescue!
The genesis of BusyBox had nothing to do with embedded Linux. The project was instigated in 1996 by Bruce Perens for the Debian installer so that he could boot Linux from a 1.44 MB floppy disk. Coincidentally, this was about the size of the storage on contemporary devices, and so the embedded Linux community quickly took it up. BusyBox has been at the heart of embedded Linux ever since.
BusyBox was written from scratch to perform the essential functions of those essential Linux utilities. The developers took advantage of the 80:20 rule: the most useful 80% of a program is implemented in 20% of the code. Hence, BusyBox tools implement a subset of the functions of the desktop equivalents, but they do enough of it to be ...
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