I too don't see how it is useful but it's certainly a thing. The Solaris impleme... | Hacker News

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zwp on March 7, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: /usr/bin/time: not the command you think you know

I too don't see how it is useful but it's certainly a thing. The Solaris implementation looks like this:

    #!/bin/ksh -p
    # ...
    cmd=`basename $0`
    $cmd "$@"

I just noticed that the what(1)-string (I haven't seen on of those for a long time) references "alias.sh", perhaps this is a clue?

    #ident  "@(#)alias.sh   1.2     00/02/15 SMI"

Were builtins actually aliases in an early shell? I still don't understand how this works though.

tyingq on March 7, 2017 [–]

That's a funny implementation. It would end up being an infinite loop for any command that wasn't a builtin, or didn't have an identically named thing higher up the PATH. Like if you renamed it from /usr/bin/cd to /usr/bin/mycd.

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