You have 20 years of experience on this kind of stuff and don't recognize the textbook example code for handling the head pointer case of a linked list? Well, okay...
(It's at least 23 years old because I learned from textbooks that have this example code way back then. It probably dates all the way back to K&R.)
Well, I'm at work so I can't dig around my library but it was easy enough using date range restrictions to find an academic example in Google that dates back to '99: http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/105/LinkedListProblems.pdf . (It was actually the first hit.) Searching further backwards in time is left as an exercise to the reader.
Multi-level pointer dereferencing is a fundamental C / assembly language skill and Linus' example was just about the most basic example there is.
(It's at least 23 years old because I learned from textbooks that have this example code way back then. It probably dates all the way back to K&R.)