Pete  wrote:
> Coming in a month late on this, but I'm curious...
>
> In article ,
> Andy Burns   wrote:
> >
> >the open square bracket is usually
> >
> >/usr/bin/[
> >
> >which might be a hard or soft link to /usr/bin/test
> >
> I'd forgotten this convention, so I went and looked... and it's not!
> I mean '[' is not a link, but an executable of its own, that's a different
> length from /usr/bin/test.  This is true on the Pi, on my Linux laptop,
> and even in Haiku. My question is, why?
>
Looking at strings within the '[' executable I see, among other
things:-

    NOTE: [ honors the --help and --version options, but test does not.
    test treats each of those as it treats any other nonempty STRING.

So, at least on Ubuntu Linux, they aren't identical.

--
Chris Green
·

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