On Feb 23, 2:11 pm, Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote: > On 2/23/2012 2:34 PM, HoneyMonster wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > On Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:24:23 -0500, Jerry Hill wrote: > > >> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 2:11 PM, HoneyMonster > >> <some...@someplace.invalid> wrote: > >>> $ cd /usr/bin $ ls -l python* > >>> -rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 9496 Oct 27 02:42 python lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root > >>> 6 Oct 29 19:34 python2 -> python -rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 9496 Oct 27 > >>> 02:42 python2.7 $ diff -s python python2.7 Files python and python2.7 > >>> are identical $ > > >>> I'm just curious: Why two identical files rather than a symlink? > > >> It's not two files, it's a hardlink. You can confirm by running ls -li > >> python* and comparing the inode numbers. > > > You are spot on. Thank you, and sorry for my stupidity. > > The question 'why a hardlink rather than symlink' is not stupid. It was > part of the discussion ofhttp://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/ > The answer was 'history' and how things were 20 years ago and either the > pep or the discussion around it says symlinks are fine now and the > decision is up to distributors. > > -- > Terry Jan Reedy
I believe the changes for PEP 394 are using symlinks. The distro maintainer can, of course, change that. John Roth -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
