5 ms·

I do like that /bin/true can actually fail and return false, which technically makes a "Not /bin/false" invocation more resilient: https://github.com/coreutils/

I do like that /bin/true can actually fail and return false, which technically makes a "Not /bin/false" invocation more resilient: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true.c#L67 https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true.... (and yes, I know it's the most unlikely thing, I just found it funny)

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Only if run with options, right? It looks like just running `true` is unaffected unless the comment is misleading me.
- patal 3y ago
  Yeah, I don't see it either. If being run without --help or --version, true can only ever return EXIT_SUCCESS. However, I find it interesting that true and false use the very same implementation.
somat 3y ago
The other interesting thing about the true command is how much more complicated it got then it needed to be. first an exercise touch mytrue chmod u+x mytrue ./mytrue echo "error code for mytrue is $?" This is literally how true started life. yes it is very zen. The first offense was legal. All code had to have a copyright disclaimer. even an empty file? Yes. so now it was a file with a copyright disclaimer and nothing else. And the koan-like question comes to mind is "Can you copyright nothing?" well AT&T sure tried. Then somebody said our programs should be well defined and not depend on a fluke of unix, which at this point was probably a good idea. So true finally had code. It was "exit 0" Then somebody said we should write our system utilities in C instead of shell so it runs faster. openbsd still has a good example of how this would look. http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/usr.bin/true/true.c?rev=1.1&content-type=text/plain http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/usr.... At some point gnu bureaucracy got involved and said all programs must support the '-h' flag. so that got added, then they said all programs must support locale so that got added. now days gnu true is an astonishing 80 lines long. https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true.c https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true.... Which is fine I guess, but that is a lot of code for a program that by definition "Does nothing, successfully" http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

Only if run with options, right? It looks like just running `true` is unaffected unless the comment is misleading me.

patal 3y ago
Yeah, I don't see it either. If being run without --help or --version, true can only ever return EXIT_SUCCESS. However, I find it interesting that true and false use the very same implementation.

somat 3y ago

The other interesting thing about the true command is how much more complicated it got then it needed to be. first an exercise touch mytrue chmod u+x mytrue ./mytrue echo "error code for mytrue is $?" This is literally how true started life. yes it is very zen. The first offense was legal. All code had to have a copyright disclaimer. even an empty file? Yes. so now it was a file with a copyright disclaimer and nothing else. And the koan-like question comes to mind is "Can you copyright nothing?" well AT&T sure tried. Then somebody said our programs should be well defined and not depend on a fluke of unix, which at this point was probably a good idea. So true finally had code. It was "exit 0" Then somebody said we should write our system utilities in C instead of shell so it runs faster. openbsd still has a good example of how this would look. http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/usr.bin/true/true.c?rev=1.1&content-type=text/plain http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/usr.... At some point gnu bureaucracy got involved and said all programs must support the '-h' flag. so that got added, then they said all programs must support locale so that got added. now days gnu true is an astonishing 80 lines long. https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true.c https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true.... Which is fine I guess, but that is a lot of code for a program that by definition "Does nothing, successfully" http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html