\
patterns
(which
builds hyphenation tables), and \
dump
(which writes out a format).
On modern systems, the size of this code is insignificant in
comparison to the memory available, and maintaining separate programs
has been found sufficiently error-prone that free Unix-style system
distributions have abolished initex and its friends and
relations such as inipdftex in favour of a single
executable (that is, just tex or pdftex) that
will “do what initex (or whatever) used to do” if it
detects the command option “-ini
”.
The change happened with the advent of teTeX version
3.0, which appeared at the beginning of 2005. At that time,
TeX Live was following teTeX, so that year’s TeX Live
distribution would also have dropped initex.
It would appear that the equation is somewhat different for the
MiKTeX developers, since that system continues to offer an
initex executable.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=initex