I'd like to request a small feature addition to the 'true' and 'false'
utilities: a modification to the install script so that /bin/1 is a
hardlink to /bin/true and /bin/0 is a hardlink to /bin/false. (Symlink
would work as well if preferred.) This additional feature would be used
with external scripting interpreters that use 0 and 1 as truth values, such
as GNU bc. The useful idiom would be
if `bc <<< "$VAL1 > $VAL2""`
then
...
fi
In my view this would be a clearer idiom than what can be achieved without
these links, due to the order that parameter expansion, aliasing, etc, are
implemented in the shell. (You can use test or expr to make an exit code
for the shell, or fiddle with parameter expansion, or build an if test into
the bc code, but these approaches obfuscate what you're doing. It would be
nice to "alias 0='false'", etc., or fiddle with function definitions, but
it doesn't work because of the way the shell does various things.)
POSIX doesn't allow truth values in bc expressions, or shell here-strings
for that matter, so this would be yet another GNU extension.
Since, at present, 0 and 1 are not names of utilities or internal commands,
you get an error if you try to execute 0 or 1. Consequently, I anticipate
that the addition would be backward compatible.
