I understand that BB's utilities are bare bone, but what if one of its utilities offers exactly the same options as their counterparts or just the options that the user needs? Wouldn't it be preferable then to use BB? After all - at least in frugal installs - busybox is already running, and calling one of its functions seems so much more efficient than executing the often heavy corutils binary.
Lately I tried to use the fold utility (coreutil version 8.19) to wrap Japanese text. Without any options fold wraps text into colums 80 characters wide. When I piped the text through fold in gtkdialog, I received an error: Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_text_buffer_emit_insert: assertion g_utf8_validate (text, len, NULL) failed. Sometimes it worked OK, but most often it did not. I couldn't find a pattern. I then turned to busybox fold and it never failed. It appears that the coreutils version can't handle UTF-8 properly while busybox can.
Here a test case with UTF-8 symbols instead of Japanese characters. This triggers a segmentation fault error and Leafpad will not run:
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echo '☂☃☄★☆☇☈☉☊☋☌