Re: man dangling symlink question
"Monique Y. Herman" <spam@bounceswoosh.org> writes:
> I'd never heard of update-alternatives or /etc/alternatives until a few
> days ago on this list, and to be honest I'm still a little (a lot) foggy
> on what exactly it's used for. For instance, I have
> /etc/alternatives/vi and /etc/alternatives/editor ... what applications
> will use these values?
nvi, vim, and elvis (all vi clones) will register alternatives for vi;
these, plus emacs, xemacs, nano, etc. will be alternatives for editor.
> To make it even more confusing, I see the following:
>
> monique@home:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/vi
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Jun 30 2002 /usr/bin/vi ->
> /etc/alternatives/vi*
{65} dmaze% ls -l /etc/alternatives/vi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Oct 8 08:30 /etc/alternatives/vi -> /usr/bin/vim*
'/usr/sbin/update-alternatives --display vi' can also be informative
for seeing what's going on.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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