I made just a very basic LFS system that consisted of just the bash shell but the whole thing ended up taking up 500MB of space.

On the website it stated that you could easily get it to be under 100MB of space but I am really confused on how you would do that.

I am going to make another LFS system that just has the VERY basic bash tools I need for a system recovery and remove the compiling tools such as GCC.

edit:

I think the reason why It was so big was because I forgot to remove the tools directory and all the sources and their uncompressed directories but I am not really sure....

How do you strip out the debugging symbols from all packages? That would certainly make it smaller!

I still don't quite understand the point of chapter 5.

You can use binutil's strip command to remove symbols from library files and programs.

If you have the development environment & the source files installed or mounted on the target that might account for the size. Do you build packages while chroot'ed in the blfs system, or do you compile packages from you main system? If you run "mount --bind" or "mount --make-shared" to bind directories for your include files, etc. to under the blfs root directory, maybe you just need to unmount them before creating an image.

The way you kidna create the system is as follows:

Use a forgeign (one from your live cd) compiler to dump a fresh binary on your hdd of the compiler and libraries and basic tools.

Use these basic tools to compile a few more basic tools and a new compiler all set up to use fresh libraries. This is chapter 5. So all you have done is make a nice, clean compiler and a few tools, all of which use nice clean libraries, fairly specific to your hardware set up. Everything here is pretty self contained to $LFS/tools, so all binaries are expecting libriaries to be some sub directory of $LFS/tools.

You then, use that lot, to reinstall everything with the correct paths (ie /bin, /etc, /lib) rather than links hardwired inside the binaries in Chapter 5. What you are left with is a clean copy of everything, your compiler has been made just for you on your own hardware using a compiler that has been made for your hardware.