On Tuesday 25 July 2006 15:41, Alan McKinnon wrote: > The answer is simple: > > 'test' is a bash builtin. When a bash script executes 'test', it is > not /usr/bin/test that runs, but a function internal to bash. > > /usr/bin/test/ is provided for environments that want to run bash > scripts that use test but bash is not the shell in use.
This makes sense. > test and [ are not links to each other as they have different syntax > (the closing ]), so they cannot be the same command. If they were > linked, one of them would fail on execution with invalid syntax errors This is not 100% true. As Neil Bothwick said, *the same program* can behave differently based on the name it was invoked with, so [ could very well have been implemented as a link to test (or viceversa), but this is not the case, as you can see with a ls -l /usr/bin/test /usr/bin/[ -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
