June 2017
Intermediate to advanced
478 pages
13h 14m
English
The shell is just a way of launching other programs, and a shell script is little more than a list of programs to run, with some flow control and a means of passing information between programs. To make a shell useful, you need the utility programs that the Unix command line is based on. Even for a basic root filesystem, you need approximately 50 utilities, which presents two problems. Firstly, tracking down the source code for each one and cross-compiling it would be quite a big job. Secondly, the resulting collection of programs would take up several tens of megabytes, which was a real problem in the early days of embedded Linux when a few megabytes was all you had. To solve this problem, BusyBox was born.
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