On Tue, 2002-03-05 at 11:32, Stephen Gran wrote: > Hello all, > I've just set up a laptop with Woody, going lovely, thanks to all of > you. I noticed while writing a shell script that searches some of my > $PATH that I have a file /usr/bin/[ - is this normal? I don't remeber > seeing it on any of my other boxen, although I don't have access to > them right now to check. Looking at it, it's a binary file, so I > don't think it's an artifact of a poorly written shell script I wrote > (and I haven't done much else on this box). I'm heavily firewalled, > so I don't really think I've been hacked, it's just kind of odd. I > look forward to your answers. > Thanks, > Steve > Steve:
No, you haven't been cracked. Or at least, this is not evidence for it. "[" is a synonym for the program "test". On my system, it's a symbolic link to /usr/bin/test. It's there so you can do things in shell scripts like: if [ -x /etc/rc.d/init.d/apm ] instead of if test -x /etc/rc.d/init.d/apm See "man test." If you use the "[" form, you have to supply a trailing bracket. IHTH. Tony
