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In today #Linux #shell adventures, did you know that [ is an executable ELF binary provided by coreutils? There's a /usr/bin/[ program in the $PATH on most Linux systems.

Check it out:
which [

#Linux #shell

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in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

Jonathan Lamothe
Jonathan Lamothe
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@Scott Williams 🐧 ...which is usually a symlink to /usr/bin/test, if I'm not mistaken.

Edit: It appears this may no longer be the case.

@Scott Williams 🐧
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Scott Williams 🐧
Scott Williams 🐧
• •
It's not a symlink on Fedora, at least. It's an ELF executable. It very well might be a wrapper on test at the code level, though.
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

Jonathan Lamothe
Jonathan Lamothe
• •
@Scott Williams 🐧 Ah, my source on this was a book I purchased in the 90s. I may well be misremembering, or things may have changed since then.
@Scott Williams 🐧
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

silverwizard
silverwizard
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@Jonathan Lamothe @Scott Williams 🐧 On my system both are their own binaries, and both seem to be different (vbindiff shows differences), but they do the same thing
@Jonathan Lamothe @Scott Williams 🐧
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