mars

coreutils

Beyond busybox. coreutils is the headliner, but we need some more packages too.

apk add coreutils less

Standards

As convenient as coreutils are, it is easy to get too fancy with the GNU extensions and write something in a shell script that wouldn’t work anywhere else. Consulting the busybox interactive help is a good way to avoid that.

busybox cut --help

Sometimes the busybox variant might be the one that’s non-standards compliant. Or neither might be, and in different ways.

pax is POSIX compliant. Nobody cares, everyone still ships cpio.

install

Install is convenient for editing files in /etc because it can create leading directories, set file permissions, and of course copy the file all in a single invocation. /dev/stdin is a valid input file.

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