[TUHS] the first busybox

[Warner Losh via TUHS]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2026 at 12:18 AM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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.
>

I've been reminded that FreeBSD 2.0's installer did a similar thing with a
hacky shell script in 1994 so it could fit on a floppy. crunchgen replaced
that.

Warner