Douglas McIlroy wrote in <CAKH6PiWG-cFwQYPKDhKg_LdDKChC8odbxnnTOjC9+KZea7OgQA(a)mail.gmail.com>: |> But it misses the coolness of the empty true(1). | |Too cool. With an empty true(1), execl("true", "true", 0) is out in the |cold. There i stand singing "ein Männlein steht im Walde" (a "little man" stands in the forest). ..ok, but then i do note here and now the certain lists where the question on whether an additional entry in the search path does make any sense at all for certain constructs comes up regulary, (even) i have lived this multiple times already, it is about The [.] command search [.] allows for a standard utility to be implemented as a regular built-in as long as it is found in the appropriate place in a PATH search. [.]command -v true might yield /bin/true or some similar pathname. Other [non-standard] utilities [.] might exist only as built-ins and have no pathname associated with them. These produce output identified as (regular) built-ins. Applications encountering these are not able to count on execing them, using them with nohup, overriding them with a different PATH, and so on. The next POSIX standard will have around 4058 pages (3950 without index) and 137171 lines (not counting index). And i was surely laughing when this list it surely was came along this somewhen in the past, and isn't that just "a muscle car": #?0|kent:unix-hist$ git show Research-V7:bin/true | wc -c 0 Many greetings and best wishes!! --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)