On Mon, May 06, 2002 at 12:40:26AM -0700, Vineet Kumar wrote: > > In general, if xterm is invoked via a symlink, the result is different! > > I was under the impression that invoking a program via a symlink is > > transparent as far as the execution context of the program is concerned. > > It is on some levels; the symlink is dereferenced to get to the actual > code of the executable. A program can tell how it was called by looking > at argv[0], though. You should get the same result if you copy (instead > of symlinking) to a different name and running the copy. With the > symlink, the execution is identical, but the environment (containing the > command line) is different.
In fact, I believe this is the way tetex does latex. latex is a symlink to tex, but when tex runs, it checks to see if it was named latex, and if so loads the latex packages. :) -- David Roundy http://civet.berkeley.edu/droundy/
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