BusyBox - What is it?

What is BusyBox? The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux Coming in somewhere between 1 and 5 Mb in on-disk size (depending on the variant), BusyBox is a very good ingredient to craft space-efficient distributions. BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, t

During the creation of the preceding posts on kubernetes, coreos, and docker, I have encountered something called ‘BusyBox’

Many sites assume you know what this is.  Let me explain just in case your not entirely sure.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a Linux box that fits inside a single executable and is less than 5mb in size?  That’s BusyBox.

The beautiful thing about where we are in container education is we found an even easier and more consistent way to get, use and extend BusyBox… watch carefully…

docker run -it –rm busybox

Thats it – your dropped into a ‘shell’ and can run most linux commands (limited subset of switches for some).  It sure beats downloading cygwin for quick and dirty jobs.