Why is Berkeley "head" a program?

[Rik Faith [guest]]

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Certainly many current standard UN*X tools can be written as shell scripts.
The disk memory overhead required to maintain a binary, however, 
seems minimal, especially on a system with lots of disk space,
when compared with the time and process overhead of a shell script.  The
tools, as binaries, are truly shell independent, as I feel they should be:
as a user of csh, I am constantly spawning sh processes to run shell-scripts
that could have been written in C.
-- 

Rik Faith, student at the University of Florida, Gainesville
UUCP: ..!akgua!uf-csv!uf-csg!rik
[Is not life a hundred times to short for us to bore ourselves? -F.N.]