Joe Smith wrote:
Tony Nelson wrote:
> The reason seems weak to me, but test does not require a closing
> square bracket, while [ does, and:
> ...
>> GNU Coding Standards now declare that the behaviour of binary
>> should not depend on its name.
From http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/User-Interfaces.html:
Please don't make the behavior of a utility depend on the name used to
invoke it. It is useful sometimes to make a link to a utility with a
different name, and that should not change what it does.
Sounds more like a request than a declaration ;-)
I wish they had provided some rationale, seeing as how the practice has
a long history on Unix, and I (at least) have not run into any situation
where it caused a problem.
And there are good reasons for it. /bin/[ vs. /bin/test are probably
extremely rarely used since the shell built-in takes precedence unless
you specify the path explictly, but cp/ln/mv traditionally were hard
links, saving not only disk space but loading time and RAM when they are
mapped from the same inode.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
