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Comment by thyrsus | Hacker News Reader

"Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained."

I am instantly reminded of /bin/true which originally was a 0 byte length file with the execute bits set. Then the edict came down that all programs were to bear an AT&T copyright...

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It's always nice to run "/bin/true --version".

On my machine it's on version 8.32. But it's a program that run many more commands than just true. It's a good reminder that things are always more complicated than they seem.

Adding on to the complexity of things: I have a /bin/true but, as noted by /bin/true --help, my shell has its own true as well!

true.

The source for GNU's true (from coreutils [1]) seems to be 80 lines which is ... infinitely more than 0 of course, but still quite manageable especially for a core utility.

Oh, and I "love" how the coreutils code considers string comparison to be hard enough to warrant a macro (in system.h [2]):

    #define STREQ(a, b) (strcmp (a, b) == 0)

[1]: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true....

[2]: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/syste...

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