120
This article is more than 1 year old
This is why copy'n'paste should be banned from developers' IDEs
More mind-boggling code unfortunately encountered in the wild
Scream GNU murder
This isn't terrible code, per se, but it did make this writer laugh out loud. On Unix-flavored systems there is a program called /bin/true that does nothing except return a 0 status indicating success. It's useful when writing scripts. These days, true is built into your shell so you don't need an external program to generate a success status.
Just in case it's not available in a shell, true is still provided on some operating systems. Here's the GNU project's implementation of true:
/* Exit with a status code indicating success. Copyright (C) 1999-2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. */ #include <config.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include "system.h" /* Act like "true" by default; false.c overrides this. */ #ifndef EXIT_STATUS # define EXIT_STATUS EXIT_SUCCESS #endif #if EXIT_STATUS == EXIT_SUCCESS # define PROGRAM_NAME "true" #else # define PROGRAM_NAME "false" #endif #define AUTHORS proper_name ("Jim Meyering") void usage (int status) { printf (_("\ Usage: %s [ignored command line arguments]\n\ or: %s OPTION\n\ "), program_name, program_name); printf ("%s\n\n", _(EXIT_STATUS == EXIT_SUCCESS ? N_("Exit with a status code indicating success.") : N_("Exit with a status code indicating failure."))); fputs (HELP_OPTION_DESCRIPTION, stdout); fputs (VERSION_OPTION_DESCRIPTION, stdout); printf (USAGE_BUILTIN_WARNING, PROGRAM_NAME); emit_ancillary_info (PROGRAM_NAME); exit (status); } int main (int argc, char **argv) { /* Recognize --help or --version only if it's the only command-line argument. */ if (argc == 2) { initialize_main (&argc, &argv); set_program_name (argv[0]); setlocale (LC_ALL, ""); bindtextdomain (PACKAGE, LOCALEDIR); textdomain (PACKAGE); /* Note true(1) will return EXIT_FAILURE in the edge case where writes fail with GNU specific options. */ atexit (close_stdout); if (STREQ (argv[1], "--help")) usage (EXIT_STATUS); if (STREQ (argv[1], "--version")) version_etc (stdout, PROGRAM_NAME, PACKAGE_NAME, Version, AUTHORS, (char *) NULL); } return EXIT_STATUS; }
And OpenBSD's implementation:
#! /bin/sh # $OpenBSD: true.sh,v 1.2 1996/06/26 05:41:53 deraadt Exp $ exit 0
Beautiful. ®
Click here to see all Line Break columns