Re: [ in /usr/bin Question

On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 18:01 +0200, Mathias Brodala wrote:
Hi Greg.

Greg Folkert, 09.05.2007 17:37:
On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 21:07 +0800, Wang Xu wrote:
On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 09:01:50AM -0400, Tom Grove wrote:
Hello all...I am new to this Debian thing :-) I used it in the Woody
days but moved over to the FreeBSD world for the last few years. I
recently installed Testing (Lenny) and see the left bracket in my
/usr/bin directory and do not know what it is. When I ls -al it I get:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 24752 2007-01-30 13:51 /usr/bin/[

This leads me to believe that it was installed with the base system or
some package because I just installed the system earlier this week. Any
help is much appreciated. Thanks.
it is test(1)

greg@princess:~$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/\[
dpkg: /usr/bin/[ not found.
greg@princess:~$ file /usr/bin/\[
/usr/bin/[: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.4.1, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
greg@princess:~$ which test
/usr/bin/test
greg@princess:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/\[ /usr/bin/test
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 24984 2006-08-16 07:52 /usr/bin/[
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 23024 2006-08-16 07:52 /usr/bin/test
greg@princess:~$ /usr/bin/\[
/usr/bin/[: missing `]'
greg@princess:~$ /usr/bin/test
greg@princess:~$

Hmmm. I wonder what this all means.

That "[" and "test" actually do the same but "[" has a bit more code in it. (For
checking for the closing "]" and for the output of "--help" and such, I guess.)

I’m not sure what you are wondering now.

Yes, you hit exactly the wondering.

Looks like Bob McGowan also wonders why. I was used to seeing it as a
hardlink to test.

He states it much better than I, on this subject.
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