Heritage Of Bin-true

Path: athena.cs.uga.edu!emory!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!lll-winken!looking!funny-request
From: frank@cis.ohio-state.edu (Frank Adelstein)
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
Subject: The Search for Truth (or /bin/true revisited)
Keywords: maybe, computer
Message-ID: [S3b8.62ca@looking.on.ca]
Date: 26 Mar 92 00:30:07 GMT
Organization: The Ohio State University, Department of Computer and Information Science
Lines: 36
Approved: funny@clarinet.com

[this one's original --FA]

In article [S376.6e6f@looking.on.ca] 
   lance@roi.ca41.csd.mot.com (Lance Norskog) writes:
]This the /bin/true shell script from original unix:
]You see, an empty shell script does nothing and returns True.
]Here is the /bin/true shell script from AT&T Unix V.3.2:
[just a copyright notice]

Well, here is Sun's /bin/true:

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

Its revision number is 1.5.  This put me in a philosophical mood, so I
so I set out to find the original or absolute truth.  After much
speculation around here, here is the Top 5 List of what /bin/true used
to be...

1.4) exit
1.3) exit 1
1.2) 42
1.1) test !`/bin/false`

(drum roll)

1.0) echo true 
--
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