On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 11:55 -0600, Matthew Walker wrote:
> On Wed, June 18, 2008 11:52 am, Dr. Scott S. Jones wrote:
> > Just out of curiosity, what does /bin/true refer to? If it is something
> > terribly obvious, spare me the indignity, but if it's a cool trick, an
> > unknown little solution, I am curious.
> >
> 
> It's a binary that returns true. (Exit code of 0) :)

See also /bin/false. They're mostly used for shell scripting. Once in a
while I'll use that trick to whip some misbehaving application into
shape. Last one I recall was stopping Amarok from starting up Kmail when
it would crash. I just replaced the kmail binary, which I don't use,
with true and problem solved.

For the intrepid, here's a really interesting page about rewriting true
as small as possible.

        http://cs.ucsd.edu/~ricko/CSE131/teensyELF.htm

Corey

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