Unixwiz.net - Steve Friedl's Weblog: How hard could it be?

July 05, 2003

How hard could it be?
An insightful posting at BroadBandreports poses an intersting query. In the source for /bin/true on the Solaris platform, we find this:

#! /bin/sh
#
#	@(#)true.sh 1.5 88/02/07 SMI; from UCB
#
exit 0

How come it took five tries to get right? :-)

Posted by Steve at July 05, 2003 09:22 PM | TrackBack

Comments

How many Sun Engineers does it take to write /bin/true?

5, I guess.

Posted by: Jeremy Zawodny on July 6, 2003 06:03 PM

Seems like you are using outdated and slow /bin/true; atleast Solaris 9 has the new and improved version that has 'exit 0' removed, and thus the ident is:

#ident "@(#)true.sh 1.6 93/01/11 SMI" /* SVr4.0 1.4 */

In addition to that, the file header says that the code is unpublished and proprietary, so I won't attach the whole script here.=)

Posted by: Jesse Hallio on July 7, 2003 08:11 AM