# BusyBox for Elixir programs
[](https://hex.pm/packages/busybox)
[](https://hexdocs.pm/busybox/Busybox.html)
[](https://circleci.com/gh/nerves-networking/elixir_busybox)
[BusyBox](https://www.busybox.net/) is a C program that provides implementations
of many Unix utilities in one small package. It is frequently used in embedded
systems.
This Elixir module makes it available to Elixir programs on platforms that
BusyBox supports. This lets you enable more BusyBox utilities than provided by
the official Nerves systems.
All BusyBox programs are installed under the `busybox` OTP application's
`priv` directory. See the module documentation for helpers for adding the
appropriate directories to the `PATH` variable, running commands or finding
paths to commands.
The BusyBox command list is not configurable, yet. If you would like to modify
the enabled commands, look for the `make_menuconfig` helper script after you
build once. It runs BusyBox's configuration utility using the correct paths and
copies back changes. Work is needed to let you specify your own configuration in
your `config.exs`. Please consider helping add this if you need it.
## Installation
The package can be installed by adding `busybox` to your list of dependencies in
`mix.exs`:
```elixir
def deps do
[
{:busybox, "~> 0.1.0"}
]
end
```
## BusyBox or Busybox
Take a deep breath.
Upstream BusyBox uses `busybox` and `BusyBox` (mostly). We attempt to follow
upstream project's spellings in our documentation. In Elixir, the convention
would be to either use `busy_box` or `Busybox`. We decided that the lowercase
spelling was more important to stay the same since the main executable was named
`busybox`. Therefore, to stay consistent with Elixir conventions, the main
module is named `Busybox`.
## Licenses
BusyBox is covered by the [GNU General Public License version
2](https://opensource.org/licenses/GPL-2.0). Please see the [BusyBox source and
website](https://www.busybox.net) for details.
All Elixir code and infrastructure in this repository that's not BusyBox is
covered by the [MIT license](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT).