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 trivial. I haven’t tried BB’s sed yet, because sed’s RE escaping is and has always been a bizarre nightmarish Frankenstein syntax, but I’ve got a dime riding on some restriction in BB’s sed that prevents getting at capture groups there, too.
BusyBox serves a purpose; it is intentionally barely functional; size constraining trumps all other considerations. It achieves this well. My issue isn’t with BusyBox, it’s with people using it everywhere when they don’t need to, making life hell for anyone who’s trying to actually get any work done in it.
So please. For the sanity of your users: don’t reach for BusyBox just because it’s easy, or because you’re tickled that you’re going to save a megabyte or two; please spare a thought for your users on which you are inflicting these constraints. Use it when you have to, because otherwise it doesn’t fit. Otherwise, chose a real shell, at least bash, and include some tools capable of more than less than the bare minimum.
“Hey! The solution is to learn a new programming language, instead of using POSIX tools that have been around for literal decades.”
Great advice, buddy.
To be fair learning lua isn’t exactly a hard process, there’s a reason it’s embedded into so many other tools. If you’re familiar with python you’re like 85% of the way to writing something basic anyway.
I’m not (familiar with Python).
Years ago, I wrote and maintained one of the core libraries for Ruby. That experience put me off scripting languages for any serious, persistent work for good. I use them for one-offs, and therefore, I stick to languages that are ubiquitous: bash, awk, sed. Lua isn’t everywhere. Neither is Python, or Ruby, or Perl. But bash, awk, and sed are.
Except that, in BB, they’re often stripped down so much they’re barely functional.
Look, somehow this has become about OpenWRT. That was just a latest example; my post was about BusyBox, and Lua isn’t part of BusyBox. I just want developers to consider their deployment environment and maybe generate and include more capable, POSIX BB instead of just choosing the smallest and most useless.
Lua is 31 years old and has been included in OpenWrt by default for 15 years.
New to me.
I don’t care if it’s easy; suggesting Lua as solution is dissembling. I complained about poor tooling that doesn’t follow defacto standards when the device it’s running on could easily handle having a more common, older, standard bash than choosing some castrated shell.
If it were a forced choice, because of hardware limitations, of having Lua or bash, I could get it. Lua is more capable. But in this case, it’s not a choice of either/or; the device could easily handle both.
BusyBox is, as I understand, configurable for how “complete” it is. That’s why I say it’s lazy to pick some default minimal compile when it could be more accessible, and less of a pain in the ass for users.
Dude I mean in this in the most genuine, kind way: a significant aspect of being a successful programmer is using the tools in your environment. If you can’t do something without bringing in your Tool of Choice you’re artificially limiting yourself.
If your environment does not have a specific tool or functionality that you would prefer, you work around it. OpenWrt is an immensely capable OS and it manages to perform complex network operations within its (admittedly) constrained environment.
In this case you’re myopically focused on not even a specific language, but the language agnostic feature of regex capture groups. You should be asking yourself if there’s any other way to accomplish your goal without this (spoiler: there are probably dozens of alternatives)
Lua is as easy as python, potentially easier. I don’t think writing a one-off script with it to solve a specific problem is a nuts idea.