Am Tue, 11 Oct 2011 22:42:00 -0700 schrieb Canek Peláez Valdés <can...@gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:35 PM, William Kenworthy > <bi...@iinet.net.au> wrote: > > I have been checking my system for some deep seated problems and in > > the process, ran across the fact that "equery files > > sys-apps/coreutils-8.7" shows a file included called "/usr/bin/[" - > > thats right, left square bracket! > > > > Is that a bug or if real, what would you use it for? It doesnt > > seem to be on the file system ... > > > > moriah ~ # /usr/bin/[ > > /usr/bin/[: missing `]' > > moriah ~ # > > > > doesnt show much! > > Relax. It's an alias for "test" technically it's not an alias, but different binaries % ls -l /usr/bin/\[ -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 35096 Jan 20 2011 /usr/bin/[ % ls -l /usr/bin/test -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 31000 Jan 20 2011 /usr/bin/test built from the same source file coreutils/src/test.c with a #define LBRACKET that mainly changes the behavior of the argument parser in case it is built as [. >, so instead of using > > if test blah; then > ... > fi > > in bash, you can use > > if [ blah ]; then > ... > fi > > Just do /usr/bin/[ --help to get an idea. It has been there since I > started using Linux, if I remember correctly, many years ago. > > Regards.
