James Wilkinson wrote: >> Obviously the programs are related - it would be bizarre if they weren't >> - but to have two programs with the same name which do different things >> seems to me a recipe for confusion. >> It means that if I type system-config-printer >> the effect depends on the definition of $PATH on my system. > > Um. The concept of having two different implementations of the same > command has been there in Unix for most of its life. Most shells have > built-in versions of things like echo and true, but there are still > stand-alone versions of the same basic program. I'm not sure what you are saying. I only have one "echo" program /bin/echo and one "true" program /bin/true . I would find it confusing if I had two programs /bin/echo and /sbin/echo which did slightly different things. Of course, if an application asks me to type "true" it is not likely to be calling /bin/true ! -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
