Adam Wolk <adam.w...@koparo.com> wrote:
> Hi misc@
>
> I have a question regarding the what(1) command. In one interview I saw
> Theo mentioning the what(1) utility:
>
> > Two numbers exist for every component of OpenBSD. One number is the release
> > that the piece came in, ie. 2.8.
> >
> > The other number exists in each source file that was built. And that number
> > is also in each binary that was built
> > from those files. You can use the what(1) command to determine the
> > revisions of source files which make up
> > each binary.
>
> The way I understood this I could use the what utility on a binary file
> in the base OpenBSD system to see exactly which CVS revisions of
> specific files composed into the resulting binary.
>
> I tried using the tool on several base utilities like ssh, adventure, ls
> etc. None of them produced any output except the executable name itself.
>
> I took a look at the source and the manpage and saw that what this
> utility really does is stepping through the binary in search of the
> revision markup then printing out the stuff it found.
>
> I tried the utility on all the files in /usr/bin/*, /bin/* and
> /usr/lib/* and found that the only ones producing output (actual
> revision markers and source files) are plain text shell scripts.
> Additionally output is also produced for the kernel files (/bsd,
> /bsd.sp, /bsd.rd).
>
> >From the manpage
>
> > The what utility is compliant with the X/Open System Interfaces option of
> > the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (???POSIX.1???) specification.
>
> I understand that this is part of POSIX but my question is: Is standard
> compliance the sole purpose of the existence of this tool or was it
> actually able to produce output for regular system binaries back in the
> old days? In case of the latter - is there some kind of additional
> stripping or a build step change that causes the information no longer
> being embedded in the executables?
>
> I'm not saying that something is broken, but really interested to know
> what changed. Especially after seeing this URL
> http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2005/05/17/fix-for-solaris-ssh-client-hangs/
> showing the output of what(1) ran against OpenSSH on Solaris.
>
> In case this matters. I'm running a i386 snapshot from 27-Dec-2014.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Adam Wolk
> adam.w...@koparo.com
The tools work as you found, but there's nothing in the binaries to find
anymore.
They went through and removed the RCS/SCCS strings. See the commit
message here
http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/bin/cat/cat.c?rev=1.20&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup
Though CVS does still update the RCS string in the comment at the top of
the file.
I don't know what use what(1)/ident(1) still have in base other than
historically being there.
-- Martin
