19 Oct
2017
19 Oct
'17
5:01 p.m.
On 10/19/2017 07:52, Ron Natalie 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.
heh yea it certainly seems pretty funny, but i will say it did present a
neat opportunity for the NYC BSD user-group back in 2015:
http://www.nycbug.org/index.cgi?action=view&id=10635
it was pretty funny to see how many different implementations one could
dream up for such a simple program, and it seemed to speak to how each
project approaches complexity.
-pete
--
Pete Wright
pete(a)nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA