Skip Navigation

Search

Linux @lemmy.world
𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 @midwest.social

Please avoid BusyBox

This is kind of a rant, but mostly a plea.

There are times when BusyBox is the only tool you can use. You've got some embedded device with 32k RAM or something; I get it. It's the right tool. But please, please, In begging you: don't use it just because you're lazy.

I find BusyBox used in places where it's not necessary. There's enough RAM, there's more than enough storage, and yet, it's got BusyBox.

BusyBox tooling is absolutely aenemic. Simple things, common things, like - oh, - capturing a regexp group from a simple match are practically impossible. But you can do this in bash; heck, it's built in! But BusyBox uses ash, which is barely a shell and certainly doesn't support regexp matching with group capture. Maybe awk? Well, gawk lets you, with -oP, but of course BusyBox doesn't use GNU awk, and so you can't get at the capture groups because it doesn't support perl REs. It'd be shocking if BusyBox provided any truly capable tools like ripgrep, in which this would be trivi