small bug in who(1) of SVR3

[Tim Wright]

In <1991Jan12.215911.20701 at kithrup.COM> sef at kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes:

>In article <18896 at rpp386.cactus.org> jfh at rpp386.cactus.org (John F Haugh II) writes:
>>Perhaps Doug is right - perhaps one command should have one narrowly
>>defined purpose.  On the other hand, what is preventing "users" from
>>being a simple link to "who -q"?

>I was not aware that any version of *nix allowed links, hard or soft, to
>allow options to be specified.
'uptime' and 'w' under 4.1BSD are the same program. Even more fun write a
little C program to allow you to run any program with a different argv array.
Try running the v7 /bin/mail under 4.1BSD. with no argv[0] - the result:
% xa /bin/mail
Puke!
%
Honest !! (I'm not sure of the punctuation - it was a while ago).

>If you mean, as I suspect you do, that who examine argv[0] to see what it
>should do, well, I guess you're also advocating everything in /bin be the
>same program, that only examines argv[0] to find out what it should do.
>Right?
No, but once upon a time in a land before shared libraries it was pretty
reasonable to throw graphics (e.g. X-style) programs together into one large
monolithic one - that is if you wanted any disk space left :-)

Tim
--
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