busybox - Tiny utilities for small and embedded systems.

BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for the most common utilities you would usually find on your desktop system (i.e., ls, cp, mv, mount, tar, 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.

This package installs the BusyBox binary but does not install symlinks for any of the supported utilities. You can use /bin/busybox --install to install BusyBox to the root directory (you do not want to do this to your your Debian system, except in dire emergencies!).

This package was suggested as a alternative to sash:

Get the busybox package, run 'make allyesconfig', and then run 'make menuconfig' to enable static linking, and maybe tweak the config a bit. Build it.

You get a shell with almost a complete system inside, and all in the size of 1.3MB or so (i386). "all" does not include strace and tcpdump, but almost everything else, including very simple rpm, dpkg, dhcp client, dhcp server, httpd, telnetd, telnet, strings, grep, awk, sed, top and vi. And many more.

More information on this package can be found on the Debian web site.
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