Rob Pike: /bin/true used to be an empty file

Discussed in more depth in "Code Inflation" in IEEE Software at https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/issue... . Links to that article are posted to HN about every 6-9 months. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=code%20inflation&sort=byPopula...

See also http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html , with about 80 HN comments https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%2Fbin%2Ftrue%20command&sort=b... .

> This is why we can't have good software. This program could literally have been an empty file, a nothing at all, a name capturing the essence perfectly. > But the inexorable forces of improvement dictate we can't accept that, so here we are:

Keeping things as simple as possible is a bit of a losing battle.