The dual launchd and launchctl files are the only single binaries that report the version number in Finder, as far as I can tell.
From Mac OS X and iOS Internals , it describes launchd launch as directly by the kernel, and also the name / sbin / launchd is hardcoded as the variable init_program_name. "
I suspect that the version number is also hardcoded so that Finder knows what to display, otherwise Finder sees this as a special known case.
If you use the βwhatβ command, you can also see the version number in binary format, which in my case is 2.0.0 on Yosemite 10.10.2:
$ what /sbin/launchd /sbin/launchd PROGRAM:launchd PROJECT:libxpc-559.10.3 VERSION:Darwin System Bootstrapper 2.0.0: Wed Nov 12 18:47:07 PST 2014; root:libxpc_executables-559.10.3~1/launchd/RELEASE_X86_64
source share