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

[Dan Cross]

[I tried to send this earlier, but was thwarted by list shenanigans.
Apologies if it's a dup.]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 10:52 AM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> My favorite reduction to absurdity was /bin/true.   Someone decided we
> needed shell commands for true and false.   Easy enough to add a script that
> said "exit 0" or exit 1" as its only line.
> Then someone realized that the "exit 0" in /bin true was superfluous, the
> default return was 0.  /bin/true turned into an empty, yet executable, file.
>
> Then the lawyers got involved.    We got a version of a packaged UNIX (I
> think it was Interactive Systems).    Every shell script got twelve lines of
> copyright/license boilerplate.     Including /bin true.
> The file had nothing but useless comment in it.

Gerard Holzmann has something on this that I think is great:

http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/Code_Inflation.pdf

        - Dan C.

PS: A couple of thoughts.

The shell script hack on 7th Edition doesn't work if one tries to
'execl("/bin/true", "true", NULL);'.  This is because the behavior of
re-interpreting an execution failure as a request to run a script is
done by the shell, not exec in the kernel. This implies that one could
not directly exec a shell script, but rather must exec the shell and
give the path to the script as the first argument. I vaguely recall we
had a discussion about the origin of the '#!' syntax and how this was
addressed about a year or so ago.

I tried to write a teeny-tiny '/bin/true' on my Mac. Dynamically
linked, the obvious "int main() { return 0; }" is still a little over
4KB. Most of that is zeros; padding for section alignment and the
like. I managed to create a 'statically' linked `true` binary by
writing the program in assembler:

% cat true.s
# /bin/true in x86_64 assembler for Mac OS X
.text
.globl start
start:
mov $0x2000001, %rax # BSD system call #1
mov $0, %rdi # Exit status: 0 = 'true'
syscall

# OS X requires a non-empty data segment.
.data
zero: .word 0 As I recall,
%

macOS requires you to have a data section aligned to 4K, even if you
don't use it. The resulting binary is a little over 8K; again, mostly
zeros.

There are parlor tricks people play to get binary sizes down to
incredibly small values, but I found the results interesting. Building
the obvious C program on a PDP-11 running 7th Edition yields a 136
byte executable, stripped. Still infinitely greater than /bin/true in
the limit, but still svelte by modern standards.