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Re: Wierd file name?



On Sat, Jun 30, 2001 at 09:18:56AM -0400, hpknight wrote:
> -rwxr-xr-x    2 root     root        20092 Jun  2 17:05 /usr/bin/test
>
> looks like someone might have copied/renamed it on accident in a shell
> script.

No, it is supposed to be there.  It lets you do things like
[ foo ]
on the command line, where [ is the command, which parses it's argument
list as 'foo ]'.  It's done simply to be more aesthetically pleasing
than using the word test.  You'll note that 'man [' works fine too, and
gives you the docs for test.  If you do an 'ls -i' on /usr/bin/[ and
/usr/bin/test you'll see that they're hardlinks to the same file.

noah

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