In article ,
Chris Green   wrote:
>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.
>
Ahh. Thanks.  There are in fact quite a few differences in the text.
On the Pi, at least, '[' mentions the GPL licence. 'test' doesn't.
Doing a diff on 'strings' for the two doesn't show other major differences,
though, so I guess they were written together.  Maybe 'test' just doesn't
have user assistance -- not sure why not.

 -- Pete --

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05