Busybox

BusyBox, appropriately dubbed "the Swiss army knife of embedded Linux", is Article description::a utility that combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single, small, executable.

Invocation
To view usage information, and available funcions:

BusyBox functions
To use a tool specifically from BusyBox, execute, followed by the utility's (function's) name. For example, the following command will open up BusyBox's shell (type + to quit):

vi
BusyBox ships a fully functioning vi-like editor. To view the limited feature list of the vi command included, use:

See also text editor, Knowledge Base:Edit a configuration file.

Network not working after BusyBox gets automatically unmerged
Busybox was removed from the system set in 2021-09. Some systems may have implicitly relied on the internal BusyBox DHCP client, if the Handbook was not strictly followed during installation. This can potentially result in a BusyBox dchp client, set up to configure the network on boot, being removed when performing a depclean, which might interfere with normal network function.

In this case, the solution may be to simply reinstall a dhcp client. To do this, it may be necesarry to set up the network manually.

Configuring the network manually will surely be the best solution to install the required package(s), however if a workaround is necessary, it may be possible to download the distfile for the dhcp package to be installed (and any dependencies) from another machine or from a LiveCD with working network, and place the file in the DISTDIR, before emerging. Another possibility could be chrooting to the Gentoo installation from a liveCD.

If the BusyBox distfile is still in the cache, it may be possible to reinstall BusyBox immediately to get the network back up, and possibly install another client.