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Date:      Sun, 19 May 2002 23:32:47 +0200
From:      Steve Mazerski <smazerski@yahoo.co.jp>
To:        Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: "Base system" applications, files (newby-ish questions)
Message-ID:  <200205192332.47158.smazerski@yahoo.co.jp>
In-Reply-To: <20020519202322.GA25559@dan.emsphone.com>
References:  <200205192056.21163.smazerski@yahoo.co.jp> <20020519202322.GA25559@dan.emsphone.com>

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On Sunday 19 May 2002 22:23, Dan Nelson wrote:
> In the last episode (May 19), Steve Mazerski said:
> > (...)
> > 1. "Base system" applications
> >
> > not quite sure what the technical term is, but FreeBSD installs a
> > certain number of applications as part of the basic installation. Is
> > there any way of generating an overview (a la pkg_info) of which
> > applications / versions thereof are installed?
>
> For the most part, you can assume the version of all the binaries is
> "4.5", or whatever version of BSD you just installed.=20

Sorry, forgot to mention. I installed 4.5-RELEASE.

>  The base
> system is pretty much treated as a single unit.  Exceptions are
> programs that are actively maintained outside of FreeBSD: gcc, ntpd,
> ssh, etc.  The release engineers try not to upgrade these, preferring
> to merge in only security fixes.  Makes it easier to people to upgrade
> without having to redo all their config files. =20

Does that mean updates to these are made available between
FreeBSD releases, or only with each successive release?

(...)
> > 3. .cshrc and .profile in /
> >
> > Is there any reason for these files to be in the root directory?
>
> I don't think so.  roots homedir is /root.  Maybe it's for the
> extremely rare case where someone su's to a non-interactive uid like
> news, kmem, or bind.
>
> > 4. Duplicated command files
> >
> > I notice in several places identical commands, e.g. /bin/ln , /bin/li=
nk
> > or /bin/[ , /bin/test exist as identical duplicate files. Is there an=
y
> > reason for this, or for not implementing the duplicates as links?
>
> ln, link, [, and test are hardlinks on my system.  I don't know why
> yours aren't.  Maybe you manually copied them at some point?

Hmm. It's a fresh install a whole 12 hours old. I've been poking around
a bit but I'm sure I would have noticed if I had started to manually repl=
ace
links with copies ;-). (Pokes round a bit, brings forehead into contact
with palm of hand). Aha, they are hard links. For some reason Linux in it=
s
variations tends to use soft links in such situations, viz:

(FreeBSD)
bash-2.05a# ls -li /usr/bin/vi /usr/bin/nvi
18451 -r-xr-xr-x  6 root  wheel  280272 Jan 28 14:12 /usr/bin/nvi
18451 -r-xr-xr-x  6 root  wheel  280272 Jan 28 14:12 /usr/bin/vi

(Linux)
smaz@local:/tmp > ls -l /usr/bin/vi /usr/bin/vim
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root            3 Mar 20  2001 /usr/bin/vi -> vim
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           13 Mar 20  2001 /usr/bin/vim ->=20
=2E./../bin/vim


Enlightened thanks

Steve Mazerski


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