How to disable date utility/applet from busybox In OpenWrt-23.05?

In Openwrt 23.05, we are planning to remove the date applet provided by busysbox, instead we want to use the date utility provided by coreutils .

For this we have the following configurations enabled as below:

CONFIG_PACKAGE_coreutils=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_coreutils-date=y
# CONFIG_BUSYBOX_CONFIG_DATE is not set

With these configs, we can see the date being called from coreutils. But we are seeing date from busy box utility as well. Since I removed date applet from busy box, it’s not supposed to list date info from busy box but its listing - Is this expected ?

root@mcphost:~# which date
/bin/date
root@mcphost:~# ls -lh /bin/date
lrwxrwxrwx     1 root     root          27 Nov 14  2023 /bin/date -> /usr/libexec/date-coreutils
root@mcphost:~#
root@mcphost:~# busybox date --help
BusyBox v1.36.1 (2023-11-14 13:38:11 UTC) multi-call binary.

Usage: date [OPTIONS] [+FMT] [[-s] TIME]

Display time (using +FMT), or set time

	-u		Work in UTC (don't convert to local time)
	[-s] TIME	Set time to TIME
	-d TIME		Display TIME, not 'now'
	-D FMT		FMT (strptime format) for -s/-d TIME conversion
	-r FILE		Display last modification time of FILE
	-R		Output RFC-2822 date
	-I[SPEC]	Output ISO-8601 date
			SPEC=date (default), hours, minutes, seconds or ns

Recognized TIME formats:
	@seconds_since_1970
	hh:mm[:ss]
	[YYYY.]MM.DD-hh:mm[:ss]
	YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm[:ss]
	[[[[[YY]YY]MM]DD]hh]mm[.ss]
root@mcphost:~#

Can someone help to throw some light on this query ?

I think you'll need to use menuconfig to disable the applet..

make menuconfig --> basefiles --> [*] busybox -->
                                                 [ * ] customize busybox options
                                                 ** Applets **
                                                  ...

I had a similar issue, and as i recall, this is how i was able to disable the applet in my case.

1 Like

Yes thanks, I already tried that.. Just want to check on how to disable this via command line.