Why is the file /bin/false so large?

[Sandy Harris]

On 2/10/10, Chris Jones <jonesc at hep.phy.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

>  "I'm willing to bet those that know best have made it as optimal as
> possible, *within reason*"
>
>  as you say, even if /bin/false is carrying around some extra baggage it
>  doesn't need... does it *really* matter with modern cpus / disks ...

I'd say it does. Memory and I/O bandwidth are still finite resources.

If these programs are much larger than they need to be, how many
others are? Why are /bin/ls and /bin/ps, the first two I checked, both
over 100 K, for example? /bin as a whole on my box is 10 megs
and /usr/bin 190-odd.

On the first Unix box I used, total disk space was 24 megs and
most of that was user files. I'm not saying we need to return
there, but I do think there's a problem.