Re: Why MAC OS X has UNIX Terminals

From: Goran Larsson (hoh_at_invalid.invalid)
Date: 01/02/05 

Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 11:47:22 GMT

In article <znu-79553C.12391101012005@nntp.acecape.com>,
ZnU <znu@fake.invalid> wrote:

> Are you sure about this?

Yes.

> Because there are actually different man pages
> for csh and tsch, which isn't something you'd expect.

This is quite common in Unix systems. Many programs looks at the name
it was invoked as and modifies its behaviour depending on what name it
found.

Here is an example from SunOS 5.8 (Solaris 8) where five classical Unix
editors are combined into a single executable program with a shared
manpage for vi, vedit and view, but with individual man pages for edit
and ex.

$ ls -li /bin/* | grep `stat -i /bin/vi`
 65677 -r-xr-xr-x 5 root bin 226520 Jan 17 2003 /bin/edit
 65677 -r-xr-xr-x 5 root bin 226520 Jan 17 2003 /bin/ex
 65677 -r-xr-xr-x 5 root bin 226520 Jan 17 2003 /bin/vedit
 65677 -r-xr-xr-x 5 root bin 226520 Jan 17 2003 /bin/vi
 65677 -r-xr-xr-x 5 root bin 226520 Jan 17 2003 /bin/view
$ ls -l /usr/share/man/sman1/{edit,ex,vedit,vi,view}.1
 98256 -r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 21093 Dec 9 1999 /usr/share/man/sman1/edit.1
 98275 -r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 45550 Dec 9 1999 /usr/share/man/sman1/ex.1
 98696 -r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 166 Dec 9 1999 /usr/share/man/sman1/vedit.1
 98699 -r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 46478 Dec 9 1999 /usr/share/man/sman1/vi.1
 98700 -r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 164 Dec 9 1999 /usr/share/man/sman1/view.1
$ for p in edit ex vedit vi view; do
for> man $p | awk '/NAME/ { getline; print; }'
for> done
     edit - text editor (variant of ex for casual users)
     ex - text editor
     vi, view, vedit - screen-oriented (visual) display editor
     vi, view, vedit - screen-oriented (visual) display editor
     vi, view, vedit - screen-oriented (visual) display editor
$ 

-- 
Göran Larsson     http://www.mitt-eget.com/

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