I assume right now that you don’t have a static busybox, and you don’t even have any static executables (which is the situation in many cases, like in the default install of minimal Debian). If you don’t have busybox , I suggest overwriting cp , then you can use cp to create a copy of cp as busybox (which will be executable). import sys with open(sys.argv[1], "rb") as f: data = f.read() start = 0 width = 20 targetname = sys.argv[2] while True: part = data[start:start+width] if part=='': break a = ''.join(['\\'+(oct(ord(i)).zfill(3))[-3:] for i in part]) dest = '>' if start>0: dest += '>' dest += ' ' + targetname print("printf '{}' {} ".format(a, dest)) start += width