I too don't see how it is useful but it's certainly a thing. The Solaris implementation looks like this: #!/bin/ksh -p # ... cmd=`basename $0`

I too don't see how it is useful but it's certainly a thing. The Solaris implementation looks like this: #!/bin/ksh -p # ... cmd=`basename $0` $cmd "$@" I just noticed that the what(1)-string (I haven't seen on of those for a long time) references "alias.sh", perhaps this is a clue? #ident "@(#)alias.sh 1.2 00/02/15 SMI" Were builtins actually aliases in an early shell? I still don't understand how this works though.