[TUHS] the first busybox

[Warner Losh via TUHS]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2026, 12:02 AM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

Not to mention /rescue, which has been around about as long as NetBSD has
had it since both are based on crunchgen. NetBSD had it in 2002 and FreeBSD
in 2003, so rather late in the game.

Warner

Greg
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