busybox on IBM developer works

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Wed Aug 23 20:57:19 UTC 2006


On Wednesday 23 August 2006 3:49 am, walter harms wrote:
> interesting,
> especially the part where they describe how to add new commands.
> 
> but how do these guys program ?
> 
> To make one executable look like many executables,
> BusyBox exploits a seldom-used feature of argument passing to the main C
> function. 

In Ubuntu it's only used by obscure programs like gzip/gunzip/zcat, 
kilall5/pidof, reboot/halt/poweroff, swapon/swapoff, all the lvm utilities...  
(Did you know that even bash changes its behavior depending on whether it was 
called as "bash" or as "sh"?)

Still, on the whole a very nice article.  Possibly I should start an "articles 
about BusyBox" section on the website...

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.



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