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Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

How would you improve the description in the readme file?

    The toybox build produces a multicall binary, a "swiss-army-knife" program
    that acts differently depending on the name it was called by (cp, mv, cat...).
    Installing toybox adds symlinks for each command name to the $PATH.

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I think small but key context that needs to be mentioned here is that, Busybox always produced the memorable "Busybox v1.2.3(.*) multi-call binary" header line wherever appropriate, and used "The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux" as project tagline. That's likely why that text is written that way, so that it pattern matches inside users' brains.

That's pretty good. I'd _consider_ flipping it around so the familiar part comes first?

Perhaps, something like:

«Toybox provides a set of utilities like cp, mv, cat, ..., which are each just links to a single binary (a "multicall binary").

In this way `toybox` is like a Swiss Army knife -- several tools combined into one.

Installing toybox adds a symlink for each [of the x] command name[s] to the $PATH.»

The last sentence might be better if it said how many symlinks are added?

Aside, Busybox uses the term "Swiss Army Knife" in their description. Using the same term like that, which isn't an inherent term, might open you up to a 'passing off' claim. Multi-tool, or EDC, may work?

The app provides various subcommands, which can also be invoked based on its name. Symlinks are used to expose the subcommands as regular app names. My rewording/simplification of the description

Symlinks or hardlinks.

Just going by what's in the parent quote.

I've generally seen symlinks, but it wouldn't really matter. It's just checking argument 0, the program name, and branching off that.

That's a good description but it's odd to put it after ~60 lines of instruction on downloading and building the program. Users may want to know what it is first.

Addressing the obvious elephant in the room (busybox) is also buried:

> I left busybox due to an argument over GPLv3.

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