Have you looked at the utilities for /rescue which have already been scaled down and combined?
Not really, I'm using /rescue as my primary programs-to-have list, but apart from some obvious tips (a few -DSMALL already provided by some tools) I didn't worked on size-reduction yet. Right now I'm focusing on "porting" a nice subset of useful programs, downscaling is the next issue :)
---------------------------------------- Emile "iMil" Heitor <imil%home.imil.net@localhost> _ http://gcu-squad.org ASCII ribbon campaign ( ) - against HTML email X & vCards / \