At 12:05 PM -0500 12/11/07, Joe Smith wrote:
>Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
>> One thing that would probably help your understanding is that [ is
>> actually a command. It is usually a shell built-in command, but it
>> is also a command in /usr/bin, and is the same as the test command.
>> ...
>
>Mmm, curious. I wonder why are they /not/ the same command?
>
>$ type [ test
>[ is a shell builtin
>test is a shell builtin
>$ ls -li /usr/bin/{[,test}
>1234416 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 31404 2007-12-05 08:25 /usr/bin/[
>1234972 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 29032 2007-12-05 08:24 /usr/bin/test
>
>I always thought that [ and test were links to the same binary.
>
>I guess disk blocks aren't as precious as they once were ;-)
The reason seems weak to me, but test does not require a closing square
bracket, while [ does, and:
At 6:22 PM +0200 5/11/07, Stepan Kasal wrote:
>Hi,
>
>On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 04:44:39PM +0200, Matthias Saou wrote:
>> single square brackets, I thought "[" was a symlink to the
>> coreutils "test" command, [..]
>
>AFAIK, it used to be hard link, not symlink.
>
>> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 32168 Apr 17 13:48 /usr/bin/[
>> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 29544 Apr 17 13:48 /usr/bin/test
>
>GNU Coding Standards now declare that the behaviour of binary
>should not depend on its name.
--
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' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
