That last sentence threw me.  Good read, thanks LDO!

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11. Feb 2016 14:13 by ldo@geek-central.gen.nz:

Among the many useful commands you will find as standard on any POSIX
system is ���true���. This command does absolutely nothing, but returns a
successful exit status. (There is also ���false���, which also does
nothing, but always returns a failure status. If anyone is curious as
to how you would make use of these in shell scripts, just ask.)

This page <http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html>
gives the history of the ���true��� command from the original AT&T Unix--it
was essentially a shell script that did absolutely nothing at all. Yet
AT&T claimed copyright on it.

This article <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/10/line_break_ep2>
includes, among its examples of supposedly bad code, the full source of
the GNU ���true��� program (which actually also shares its source with the
���false��� program), which runs to 80 lines, as compared to the version
from OpenBSD, which is just four lines (including a blank line and
comments). But as pointed out in the previous link, the GNU version uses
less memory and runs faster.
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