Re: bug in hostname

[Steven Augart]

I took your approach too.  Luckily,
I did not install the GNU versions on top of the ones that shipped from
my Linux distributor, so I didn't wipe out the existing /bin/hostname.
 So it was easy to run "rm /usr/local/bin/hostname".

The problem with "kill" probably
won't affect you and your users.  Back before the C shell was written
and introduced shells with job control to the Unix world, , "kill"
was a separate binary, "/bin/kill".   That binary still
exists, largely because there are shell scripts around that explicitly
call "/bin/kill".   We don't notice this usually because
the most popular shells (tcsh and Bash)  have built-in "kill"
commands.  (Likewise zsh, ash, and ksh).    At any rate,
the util-linux package contains the version of "kill" that Red
Hat 7.3 uses.  Although Red Hat 9.0 takes the odd step of putting
util-linux's "kill" in /bin/kill and coreutils's "kill"
in /usr/bin/kill!

--Steve Augart

Martin MOKREJŠ <address@hidden> Sent by: address@hidden 10/07/2003 01:33 PM

To:        Steven Augart/Watson/Contr/address@hidden         cc:        address@hidden         Subject:        Re: bug in hostname

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Steven Augart wrote:

I have the same suggestion: remove hostname from coreutils. Who needs such
a crap? ;) I already deleted that fom our installation. I want to keep
rest
of coreutils.

BTW: What is the problem with kill? Another binary to be deleted?

> I could not agree more.    I am not terribly pleased that
there is now a
> simple-minded "hostname" command in "coreutils";
after I installed 5.0.92
> (cvs head) in my Linux machine's /usr/local/bin, suddenly the machine
> renamed itself to "--fqdn".  Why?  Because at
least one program that
> "root" runs calls "hostname --fqdn" to get the
host's fully qualified
> domain name.
>
> Linux, at least, ships with a fine "hostname" in net-tools
1.60, and I'm
> not clear on why the world needs a second one, but I wasn't part of
the
> bug-coreutils list at the time that decision was made.   (I've
just
> searched the archives and can't find any discussion of such an issue.)

-- 
Martin Mokrejs <address@hidden>, <address@hidden>
PGP5.0i key is at http://www.natur.cuni.cz/~mmokrejs
MIPS / Institute for Bioinformatics <http://mips.gsf.de>
GSF - National Research Center for Environment and Health
Ingolstaedter Landstrasse 1, D-85764 Neuherberg, Germany
tel.: +49-89-3187 3683 , fax: +49-89-3187 3585


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