What is the design of busybox?
Busybox is like a swiss army knife: one thing with many functions. The busybox executable can act like many different programs depending on the name used to invoke it. Normal practice is to create a bunch of symlinks pointing to the busybox binary, each of which triggers a different busybox function. (See getting started in the FAQ for more information on usage, and the busybox documentation for a list of symlink names and what they do.) The “one binary to rule them all” approach is primarily for size reasons: a single multi-purpose executable is smaller then many small files could be. This way busybox only has one set of ELF headers, it can easily share code between different apps even when statically linked, it has better packing efficiency by avoding gaps between files or compression dictionary resets, and so on. Work is underway on new options such as “make standalone” to build separate binaries for each applet, and a “libbb.so” to make the busybox common code available as a shared
