Splines play an important role as solutions of various interpolation and approximation problems that minimize special functionals in some smoothness spaces. In this paper, we show in a strictly discrete setting that splinesofdegreem-1solvealsoaminimizationproblemwithquadraticdatatermandm-thordertotalvariation(TV) regularization term. In contrast to problems with quadratic regularization terms involving m-th order derivatives, the spline knots are not known in advance but depend on the input data and the regularization parameter . More precisely, the spline knots are determined by the contact points of the m