All due respect to Rob Pike, but I think David Batley nails it in his response: > tl;dr: they replaced a cryptic, undocumented implementation, which starts an

All due respect to Rob Pike, but I think David Batley nails it in his response: > tl;dr: they replaced a cryptic, undocumented implementation, which starts an entire bash shell just so it can exit, and replaced it by a fast ELF binary, which works like all the others. /bin/true as an empty file may seem like an elegant implementation and lesson in UNIX, but it's actually slower, and I'd much rather have standardisation and documentation across all system commands.