28 Nov
2017
28 Nov
'17
5:21 p.m.
On 19 October 2017 at 10:52, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
My favorite reduction to absurdity was /bin/true.
Someone decided we
needed shell commands for true and false. Easy enough to add a script that
said "exit 0" or exit 1" as its only line.
Then someone realized that the "exit 0" in /bin true was superfluous, the
default return was 0. /bin/true turned into an empty, yet executable, file.
Then the lawyers got involved. We got a version of a packaged UNIX (I
think it was Interactive Systems). Every shell script got twelve lines of
copyright/license boilerplate. Including /bin true.
The file had nothing but useless comment in it.
A late comment: I seem to recall this boilerplate in earlier Solaris
but Solaris 10 has an executable. So I looked at the OpenSolaris
source out of curiosity and found this.
[CDDL stuff here]
/*
* Copyright 2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
* Use is subject to license terms.
*/
#pragma ident "%Z%%M% %I% %E% SMI"
#include <unistd.h>
/*
* Exit with a zero value as quickly as possible.
*/
int
main(void)
{
_exit(0);
/*NOTREACHED*/
return (0);
}
N.