Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:32:47 +0200
From: [email protected]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
| Ash Brad explained, it can't be an external program,
| and therefore it never was.
Actually, POSIX used to require that there be one. So some
systems would have had such a thing. As has been explained,
it was useless, but it met some bizarre philosophy of how any
shell builtin utilities were to be located, in case some user
wanted to create their own version of the builtin to replace
it - which almost (but not really) makes some sense for things
like echo, printf, test, etc - even true & false - but it makes
no sense at all for things like cd, umask, ulimit, wait, ...
POSIX finally woke up (a little) in the more recent (2024) version
of the standard, and requiring there to be a filesystem version
of absoutely every shell (non-special) builtin has gone now.
kre
