Curt Sampson writes:
> On Tue, 29 Oct 1996, der Mouse wrote:
> > Personally?  I don't like things that mutate based on argv[0].
[...]
> So what you're saying is that given /usr/libexec/uugetty hard linked
> to /usr/libexec/getty, you want a way to run uugetty and have it
> not lock, and a way to run getty and have it lock. I'm not sure I
> see the difference between `getty' vs. `uugetty' and `getty -n'
> vs. `getty -l' (or whatever). After all, in the end they're both
> just arbitrary strings.

I agree here with der Mouse. They aren't just arbitrary strings. The
name of the program is not the same as an argument -- a standard shell
insists on setting argv[0] to the name of the program on disk. If I'm
playing with getty for debugging purposes, and I name a new version
"getty.test", I should still be able to get work done. The excess
cleverness involved in switching on argv[0] is a big pain.

> We have plenty of other programs under NetBSD that work this way,
> such as Mail/mailx, at/atq/atrm/batch, chfn/chpass/chsh, uptime/w,
> zcmp/zdiff, passwd/yppasswd, reset/tset, compress/uncompress,
> gunzip/gzcat/gzip/zcat, hexdump/od, egrep/fgrep/grep, ex/vi/view,
> less/more/page, sendmail/mailq/newaliases, quotaoff/quotaon, just
> to name a few...

I don't think this is a good idea, though. Why add more of the things?

Perry