[TUHS] /bin/true (was basic tools / Universal Unix)

[Bakul Shah]

On Tue, 28 Nov 2017 10:56:52 -0700 Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
Warner Losh writes:
> 
> On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 9:21 AM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > A late comment:  I seem to recall this boilerplate in earlier Solaris
> > but Solaris 10 has an executable.  So I looked at the OpenSolaris
> > source out of curiosity and found this.
> >
> > [CDDL stuff here]
> > /*
> >  * Copyright 2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
> >  * Use is subject to license terms.
> >  */
> >
> > #pragma ident   "%Z%%M% %I%     %E% SMI"
> >
> > #include <unistd.h>
> >
> > /*
> >  * Exit with a zero value as quickly as possible.
> >  */
> >
> > int
> > main(void)
> > {
> >         _exit(0);
> >         /*NOTREACHED*/
> >         return (0);
> > }
> >
> 
> Ah, the tyranny of  static analysis tools... _exit(0) should be marked such
> that the tools know it does not return. This means the /*NOTREACHED*/ isn't
> needed. And since there's no real exit path out of  main, the return (0) is
> equally bogus (because main can't return). Yet lint and other tools have
> ushered in this insanity.
> 
> I'm glad to see these days that these sorts of lame false positives have
> been eliminated...
> 
> Then again _exit(0) is a useless optimization. It saves three closes for
> files that are bound to be closed at image tear down. If it really is that
> important (absent data, my gut tells me it isn't), then this should be
> written in assembler. FreeBSD/amd64 would be something like:
> 
> #include <sys/syscall.h>
> #include <machine/asm.h>
> 
> ENTRY(_start)
> xor %r10, %r10
> mov $SYS_exit, %eax
> syscall
> END(_start)
> 
> This some small hacks to each arch's SYS.h in libc, this could even be
> smaller and MI :). this is tiny:
> -rwxrwxr-x  1 imp  imp  672 Nov 28 10:18 true
>   text   data   bss   dec   hex   filename
>     10      0     0    10   0xa   true
> 
> Contrast that with FreeBSD's /usr/bin/true:
> -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  4624 Nov 20 11:56 /usr/bin/true
>   text   data   bss    dec     hex   filename
>   1540    481     8   2029   0x7ed   /usr/bin/true
> 
> which is little more than return(0), but also has a fair amount of
> copyright and SCCS data.

int main(void) { return 0; }

is sufficient for true.  BTW this is pretty much what
/usr/src/usr.bin/true/true.c does.

And true can also be a file of length 0 chmoded to +x.  No
need to optimize such things.

It should really be linked staticallly but crt1.o seems to
bring in the entire libc. I guess linking with just the things
a program needs is a hard problem!