[BusyBox] [PATCH] macadddr command

[Rob Landley]

On Friday 22 July 2005 07:59, Paul Fox wrote:
>  > It's been quite a while since I included ifconfig in my system, but it
>  > seems to me that it was quite a pig.  I could see wanting this small
>  > utility instead, if ifconfig was not being used for other tasks.
>
> point taken.  if you don't already have ifconfig or ip (i'm
> impressed, btw, if so), then adding it just to get the mac
> address of the interface probably feels like overkill.
> personally, i'm amazed at the lack of support in /proc for
> interface-specific information.  why isn't there a whole tree of
> status information under /proc/net/ containing addresses,
> netmasks, packet counts, byte counts, etc?  then the tool of
> choice would be "cat".

Try "/sys/class/net/eth0/address".

Adding more crap to /proc was considered counterproductive after the invention 
of ramfs.  Back when there was only one synthetic filesystem everything in 
the world got exported through it because there was no alternative, but these 
days that is very much no longer the case.  Once we get union mounts in, it 
would be a good idea to split /proc into procfs and crapfs and union mount 
them together until the apps can be fixed.

> (i've also always thought of busybox as a reimplementation of standard
> utilities.  adding new inventions to it begs the question of "where do
> we stop?".)

Primarily busybox is intended to be a small, simple, and efficient 
implementation of the posix/susv3 command line utilities.  We've added some 
stuff on top of that, but it should be clearly separated and removable.  
(Some gnu extensions are small enough not to warrant their own config option, 
but we debate each one.)

Rob