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>In fact, an empty executable file has been used to implement /bin/true on some old systems. Why take the added cost of a disk seek when just the information in the inode will do?

why is this only on old systems? it seems very efficient.



What's more efficient is that most shells don't bother running /bin/true at all. "true" is just a shell builtin, so it doesn't need to spawn a process just to get an obvious return value out of it.


It's not as efficient as it seems, as that means the shell is invoked.


Filesystems come and go. Not everyone has an executable bit.




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