Same command name; different versions; one Fedora...

[Timothy Murphy]

James Wilkinson wrote:

>> I'm not sure what you are saying.
>> I only have one "echo" program /bin/echo and one "true" program /bin/true
>> . I would find it confusing if I had two programs /bin/echo and
>> /sbin/echo which did slightly different things.
> 
> You also have echo built into bash. If you type (say)
> $ echo Trinity College Dublin
> into bash, bash *won't* call /bin/echo, but use its own internal
> variant. Try
> $ type echo
> $ type yum
> and look at the differences.

That's a completely different issue.
As I pointed out, if an application asks you to type "true"
it is unlikely to be invoking the program "/bin/true"/

> I'm sorry if I'm shattering some of your illusions here. But there is a
> lot of Unix precedent for things that do *much* the same thing to be
> called by the same name.

You haven't yet given any example of two different programs
with the same name.

I know lots of examples of the opposite -
the same program with symlinks with different names,
where the program looks to see what name it was called under,
and runs slightly differently in the different cases.



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland