Why is the file /bin/false so large?

[Bill Marcum]

On 2010-02-09, Smoot Carl-Mitchell <smoot at tic.com> wrote:
>
> 30K is large???  These days that is tiny.
>
> You could do the above shell substitutions, but the command will run
> slower, since it has to load and execute the shell to only execute an
> exit statement.
>
You could also define true and false as shell functions, if they aren't 
already builtin. (I just checked, they are in bash and dash, don't have 
other shells installed ATM.) /bin/true and /bin/false are probably only 
needed for rare occasions, or maybe just for POSIX compliance.