/bin/true
BALDWIN
mike at whuxl.UUCP
Sat May 3 05:52:02 AEST 1986
> In article <765 at bentley.UUCP> kwh at bentley.UUCP (KW Heuer) writes:
> >Btw, I never use "true". ":" is equivalent, and is more likely to be
> >a builtin. I've never had a use for "false".
>
> Their main use is to hang system-type links on.
> For example, on the system I'm typing this on,
> "gould" is linked to "true" and other system
> types such as "vax" are linked to "false".
> These commands are very useful if you maintain
> code for multiple systems all in the same place.
> [D.Gwyn]
The "proper" way to do this is by testing `uname -m`.
Linking machine types to /bin/true clutters the name
space and makes pattern matching difficult. For instance,
how would you do the following "cleanly" using the
link /bin/true method:
case `uname -m` in
3B*) # 3b specific
vax*) # vax specific
esac
True, "if gould" is prettier than "if [ `uname -m` = gould ]"
but that's a poor reason. There need to be some standards on
what `uname -m` contains, though.
--
Michael Baldwin
(not the opinions of) AT&T Bell Laboratories
{at&t}!whuxl!mike
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