On 6 March 2018 at 14:34, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday(a)crashcourse.ca> wrote:
i'm curious about RH packaging policy that dictates that some
command variants are packaged for fedora to install with symlinks
and others with hardlinks.
trivial example in /usr/bin on my fedora 27 system:
-rwsr-xr-x. 1 root root 52984 Aug 2 2017 at
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 2 Aug 2 2017 atq -> at
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 2 Aug 2 2017 atrm -> at
so even though all of those "commands" are in the very same directory,
atq and atrm are supported via symlinks, not hardlinks.
I am not an expert, some commands act differently when called
differently; so executing /bin/atq would make the 'at' binary behave
differently than when it's executed as plain 'at'.
The same logic applies to bash, /bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/bash, but
when bash is invoked as sh it acts differently than when invoked as
'bash'. Have a look at the bash manual page for more info.
--
Ahmad Samir