Busy box, Run C, python or Perl programs

Question

All I have is bourne shell and busy box. Is there any way to run a python script or compile a c program or any languages like perl ..

like busybox python eatmemory.py 100M

or

busybox gcc eatmemory.c

What I need is to create a process which will consume a specific amount of memory. and test the performance.

Thanks

Answer 1

If your question is

Does busybox come with a python interpreter or C compiler?

then the answer is no.

If it is

Is there a way to write a script that will run under busybox' ash shell which will just allocate some memory for me?

then see this answer, as suggested by Andrey.

Answer 2

a simple perl script:

use strict;
use warnings;

# store and validate the command line parameter
my $mb = $ARGV[0];
unless ( defined $mb and $mb =~ /^\d+$/ and $mb >= 1)  {
    die "Usage: $0 <occupy MB>\nEx: $0 100 - occupies 100 MB memory\n"
}
# convert it to bytes.
my $b = $mb * 1024 * 1024;

my $memfile;

# open in-memory file, and seek to size specified to get memory from OS.
open MEM, '>', \$memfile;
seek MEM, $b - 1, 0;
print MEM 'A';
close MEM;
printf "$mb MB memory is occupied, press ENTER to release: "; <STDIN>;

# till here the memory is occupied by this program.
undef $memfile;
printf "Memory released";

assuming you name the script eat_memory.pl, start it by:

perl eat_memory.pl 150

where the 150 represents megabytes