On 19 October 2017 at 10:52, Ron Natalie <ron@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);
}