And here is the madness: :)

https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/35217221c211f3...

And the motivation: it's used as test inputs. Not sure I agree with completely destroying the readability of a perfectly readable file - but ok.

The motivation, as far as I see, was only that it "may be used."

But see the post of belorn where he argues that the error handling seems to be good.

Is the date on that accurate, did that happen in 2016? Kinda hurts the theory that they were trying to avoid Unix similarity.

It says: Mar 9, 2015

One point in favor of this simple version is that it's immediately obvious that it doesn't do the same thing as the OpenBSD version. In OpenBSD `yes a b c` will only print "a" while in GNU it prints "a b c". I did not catch that when I was reading the more complicated modern version.

(joke) They copied the API of the main() function... :-)