[TUHS] the first busybox

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey via TUHS]

On Thursday, 22 October 2026 at  9:06:43 -0600, Arnold Robbins via TUHS wrote:
> ron minnich via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>> I got to wondering how far back this idea went in the Unix world. I just
>> can't remember.
>
> As Warner mentioned, some commands did this based on looking at
> argv[0]. In particular, System III and IV had cp, ln, and mv all in
> one binary.  That was circa 1980. I'm not sure I know of others.

They're still there.  FreeBSD still has a number of linked executables
in /bin: [ and test, ed and red, csh and tcsh, pgrep and pkill, link
and ln, rm and unlink.  Some look just like different names, and I
don't know to what extent their behaviour depends on the name, but
pgrep and pkill have different functionality.  Then in /sbin there are
24 different names for sha1 and friends and 17 different names for
geom and similar.  The man page for sha1 suggests that the behaviour
does depend on the name.

Greg
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