Peter Watson wrote:
"mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com> wrote in message 510c80ca-4a35-4c6c-9ff9-4398e93c8958@s8g2000prg.googlegroups.com">news:510c80ca-4a35-4c6c-9ff9-4398e93c8958@s8g2000prg.googlegroups.com...mdj@bob:~$ /bin/true --version true (GNU coreutils) 5.97 Careful what you wish for - if a program that does *nothing* successfully can reach version 5.97, who knows how far AlphaPrint can go ...I'm guessing that the 5.97 version number is related as much to the GNU coreutils as anything, but it reminds me of a funny story from my IBM mainframe days.IBM had a program called IEFBR14, which was basically a NO-OP program useful for reasons which are too esoteric to discuss here.The name pretty much described the program. It consisted of one line of assembler which generated two bytes of executable code:BR R14This basically meant "return to caller", since by convention the return address on entry is stored in register 14.This incredibly "complex" program still managed to get a bug report raised (and accepted) against it!The problem was that also by convention a program's return code should be loaded into register 15, but in IEFBR14 it still contained the value on entry, which just happens to be the program's entry point address! So the do-nothing program was always reported as ending with an non-zero error if anything checked the return code! (The fix doubled the size of the program to four bytes! Register 15 was cleared before returning.)
Thus demonstrating how difficult it is to do nothing well--how zen! ;-) -michael NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."