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usefulcat • today at 5:21 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

It may be a bit uncommon, but it's not at all new. For example, on a Linux system I have, there are several files in /usr/bin that use hard links to refer to the same file (inode) by different names:

bunzip2 / bzcat / bzip2

gunzip / uncompress

unzip / zipinfo

pigz / unpigz

pkg-config / x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-pkg-config

perlbug / perlthanks

Use ls -li to show the inode number for each file or directory. For example:

    $ ls -li /usr/bin/{bzip2,bunzip2,bzcat}
    23069197 -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 39144 Sep  5  2019 /usr/bin/bunzip2
    23069197 -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 39144 Sep  5  2019 /usr/bin/bzcat
    23069197 -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 39144 Sep  5  2019 /usr/bin/bzip2

Replies

tehbeard • today at 6:43 AM

That's more a case of providing the distinct "APIs" ( bzip2 , gunzip etc) to userland / scripts, while the implementation for all is just one binary; than it being "Configuration via name..."

Somewhat similar to how busybox does its thing.