GNU grep's new features (Linux.com)

busybox is also a bit of a special case, in that 'size is everything', so the heaps-of-symlinks approach actually makes sense.

(But you don't necessarily need any of the symlinks. If you're running everything from a busybox shell, you can tell it to find busybox commands first regardless of the absence of symlinks.)

The BSDs have a tool called crunchgen which smashes a bunch of programs into one which conditionalizes off argv[0] in much the same way. (Except that busybox is smaller and doesn't penalize the rest of the system by forcing the *default* tools to be little featureless ones.)