Sounds like bzip2. Except that bzip2 uses symlinks, instead. I believe
that "bunzip2" and "bzcat" are both _symlinks_ to "bzip2."
Although, I imagine that if you're paranoid about deleting files, you
might use hard links as a "backup." As was stated earlier, all regular
files are hard links to the file data. When all hard links are gone
("rm"ed) then the data is inaccessable, and may be overwritten. Thus, you
might have a backup folder full of hard links to all your important files.
If, for some reason one of these gets deleted, you can re-link it, because
the data is still there- hard linked from the backup folder. This way,
you keep backups to guard against deletion (but not corruption!) of files
without actually keeping a second copy of the file in question.
-Matt
On Mon, 26 Jul 1999, Richard Myers wrote:
>
> On Sun, 25 Jul 1999, Andy Goth wrote:
> > Then what are hard links good for?
>
> There are two applications which do something similar. Call them xyzzy and
> plugh. xyzzy gives you a help menu, but plugh is for expert users who
> don't need (and don't want) a menu.
>
> I write a better application-- better than both of them, but it
> incorporates the features of both. Everyone starts using my application
> instead of the two old ones.
>
> And I include a flag that you can set-- either menu, or no menu. But my
> users get tired of always having to turn that darn menu on or off.
>
> Soooooo, I come up with this great idea. I create two names (make that two
> *file* names) for the new application, xyzzy, and plugh. These are hard
> links to the same file. They both do the same thing-- launch my program.
>
> Well, they do one thing different. They place different values into one
> special variable made available to my program, which keeps track of what
> filename was used to launch my program. And those two different values
> are: xyzzy, and plugh.
>
> In my application I test whether it was called with the command xyzzy. If
> so, I make it act like xyzzy, menu and all.
>
> If my application was called by the name plugh, I know this must be an
> expert user-- she's calling it by the name of the old program she used to
> use-- and so for her my application automatically provides no menu to take
> up screen space and get in the way.
>
> Hard links make both my user groups happy.
>
>
> (Honesty in posting-- I didn't come up with any of these ideas, but I
> think they are nifty. ;-)
>
> Trivia-- xyzzy and plugh are actually magic words from the 70's computer
> game "advent".
>
>
> best wishes,
>
> richard myers
>
