BusyBox Portable Launcher

Description

A portable launcher for busybox-w32, providing some additional features.

Features

• Portable.
  • Scattered files used by busybox-w32's interactive shell are stored portably in either Data/ directory or anywhere the environment variable HOME points to.
  • Your customization of the interactive shell (e.g. prompt string, alias, functions, etc.), together with the shell history, will go with you.
  • No program remains running waiting for busybox-w32 to close to clean up. Which means, no mess will be left behind even when unexpected termination of programs.
• Launch interactive shell at a specified directory, or at current directory. Good for launching a shell while working in Windows Command Prompt. Kind of like "Open BusyBox Here."
• Execute a shell script or a busybox command. Not a new feature per se. Just that we can use an unified interface to do it.
• Launch as admin (root). A separate launcher is provided to launch as admin (root). All features shown above also apply when working as admin (root)! This may seem trivial, but actually it's a little bit tricky to achieve when dealing directly with busybox-w32.

Files and Usage

Main files

• BusyBoxPortable.cmd
  • The launcher. Running it without arguments starts an interactive shell at the current directory.
  • BusyBoxPortable.cmd --help will display usage details.
• BusyBoxPortable.admin.cmd
  • Same as BusyBoxPortable.cmd, except that busybox is started as admin (root).
  • This file is optional. You don't need it if you are not planning to use the "launch as admin (root)" feature. (You can always start the launcher as admin manually.)
  • BusyBoxPortablePortbale.cmd --help will display usage details.

Auxiliary files

• When starting an interactive shell,
  • if environment variable HOME does not exist, it will be set to Data/.
  • if the $HOME directory does not exist or is empty, it will be clone from App/DefaultData/.
  • if exists, $HOME/.bashrc will be sourced automatically. This is the main file your customization should be kept.
  • Shell history will be saved to $HOME/.ash_history.
• App/BusyBox/busybox.exe
  • It is a renamed busybox64.exe (64bit).
  • Updating or changing version: from its official website,
    • download the 64-bit version and rename it to App\BusyBox\busybox.exe, or
    • download the 32-bit version and rename it to App\BusyBox\busybox.exe.
• App/elevate/elevate.exe
  • An tiny open-source utility to run commands as admin, from here.
  • This file is optional. You don't need it if you are not planning to use the "launch as admin (root)" feature. (You can always start the launcher as admin manually.)

FAQ

The directory layout of this project looks complicated. Why not put everything inside one directory and be done with it?

My directory layout mimic the PortableApps.com Format. The detailed reasoning may worth a separate project to discuss, but TL;DR: it allows multiple users to share the core program but at the same time keeping their data isolated.