On: Why bother with argv[0]?

[cubist_castle]

I just learned that rustup/rustc/cargo etc. work like this too. I couldn't understand why the gentoo formula was symlinking the same binary to a bunch of aliases.

[kbolino → cubist_castle]

On my system, these are hardlinks (regular files with a link count >1 and the same inode) rather than symlinks, though I'm not sure why.

[mostthingsweb → kbolino]

Maybe to avoid broken links if you move the original files? That's the main benefit of hardlinks vs symlinks in my mind at least.

[actionfromafar → mostthingsweb]

That can also be a downside, you believe you have moved stuff but now you can have different versions of programs that don't expect that to be a possibility.

[ForOldHack → actionfromafar]

If there is a simlink, a hardlink and an executable, all with the same name, which one will it run? Which one will the shell object to? Which one should the shell object to. If a virus/SUID program overwrites a simlink, no problem, but ift it traces the simlink to the executable, and then over writes that...

[alerighi → cubist_castle]

And that makes a lot of sense, especially for binaries that are statically linked (as usually are Rust binaries), since that could save a lot of disk space!

[duped → cubist_castle]

clang does this too.