BusyBox

BusyBox: The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux.

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(Last edited by Prabuanand on 21 Oct 2024.)

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, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts. BusyBox provides a fairly complete environment for any small or embedded system.

Ash shell

Alpine uses Busybox Ash for its default shell.

using aliases

One can’t set aliases in the ~/.profile, but environment variables can be set in it. In order to use aliases with Busybox Ash, you must set the ENV environment variable to the file where you define your aliases.

First create the file /etc/profile.d/profile.sh as follows:

Contents of /etc/profile.d/profile.sh

if [ -f "$HOME/.config/ash/profile" ]; then
	. "$HOME/.config/ash/profile"
fi

Next create the file ~/.config/ash/profile as follows:

Contents of ~/.config/ash/profile

export ENV="$HOME/.config/ash/ashrc"

Now aliases can be added in the file ~/.config/ash/ashrc:

Contents of ~/.config/ash/ashrc

su="doas -s"

Ash shell

using aliases

See Also