On Fri, Feb 05, 1999 at 08:22:46PM -0600, dan wrote:
> I was looking through the contents of /bin when I noticed that the files grep,
> egrep, and fgrep, were all identical. Further investigation shows that they
> determine how to act by analyzing their command line.
>
> Here is how to reproduce what I found:
>
> $ cd /bin; ls -l *grep
> -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 75728 Apr 27 1998 egrep
> -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 75728 Apr 27 1998 fgrep
> -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 75728 Apr 27 1998 grep
> $ diff grep egrep
> $ diff grep fgrep
Note the "3" in those ls'es -- that means the binary "grep" has three
different names. If you try ls -i *grep to get the inode numbers, you'll
notice that they're all the same:
190 -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 75728 Apr 27 1998 /bin/egrep*
190 -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 75728 Apr 27 1998 /bin/fgrep*
190 -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 75728 Apr 27 1998 /bin/grep*
So they're hardlinks, so there's no extra space being used.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking
for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.''
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