Those who don't see anything unusual or wasteful about an 8KB+ executable whose only action is to exit and return a value are recommended to watch this demo generated in realtime by a 4KB executable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o

There's more here: http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type[]=4k

The demoscene is basically the exact opposite of mainstream software culture, and although it's focused on multimedia shows, I think some of their techniques and underlying motivation could be applied more generally...

I wonder if /bin/true and /bin/false in their most simplest forms even meet the minimum "requirement for creativity" to be copyrightable, and if the reason why it has bloated significantly is so that it could be.