[BusyBox] command path shortcut.

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Wed Feb 18 08:23:03 UTC 2004


On Tuesday 17 February 2004 15:28, Nick Gully wrote:
> Hello,
> 	I was wondering if it is worth to anybody the byte saving (at 12
> bytes a command or so, 2k or so for all the busybox commands) of
> having  the shell by default feed commands to
> busybox instead of traversing symbolic links (so remove all the symbolic
> links to programs busybox replaces).  Or is any reason I missing
> that this wouldn't work? I tried to find it on this list and came up
> empty.
>
> Best Regards,
> 	Nick
> trying to fit a small kernel, busybox, and mozilla on an iOpener.
> and mozilla is truly the huge monster. ;)

Right now, the built-in-commands functionality of the busybox shell is kind of 
broken.  It turns out ash isn't reentrant, it has to exec something to 
reinitialize its state, so it execs /bin/busybox and feeds it the appropriate 
command line to run the command in question.

See shell/ash.c line 3715 or so.

So it may do what you want if you configure it right, albeit for really bad 
reasons.  Fixing this is on my to-do list, but Vladimir showed me that it's 
one of those "drill through from the other side of the mountain to get there" 
kind of problems.  I have to change a lot of stuff to fix this right.  (Make 
ash reentrant so it can run_applet_by_name(), basically.)

Rob




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