From: jwinstea@jarthur.claremont.edu (Jim Winstead Jr.) Subject: Re: Difference between Root Disk utils and GNU packages? Date: Tue, 7 Jul 1992 08:25:55 GMT
In article <CORYWEST.92Jul7023414@rio-grande.rice.edu> corywest@rice.edu (Cory West) writes:
>
> I was wondering what the difference is between utils on the
>root disk and the utils in the GNU package? I currently have
>the textutils, shutils, and fileutils all installed on my system
>and am not using the things from the root disk that are duplicates.
>I have noticed that the GNU utils are huge compared to the root
>disk utils, but since these things are seldom run for long periods
>of time and I have the resources, I didn't pay too much attention
>to that.
All of the utilities on the root disk are linked against the shared
libraries, and all of the smaller utilities are linked as 'impure'
executables, to boot. This results in them being much smaller than
statically linked executables, and for the impure executables,
noticeably smaller than those linked as 'pure' executables.
> Are there any arguments for or against using these over the
>root disk supplied utils (I speak only of duplicated utils, not
>unique root disk linux utils)? I was just curious what everyone
>thought and wanted to check before chucking the root disk duplicates.
My advice would be to replace what you have with the utilities
available on the root disk - these are compiled with the latest shared
libraries, and as a result make use of the new stat() call and
readdir() call that are essential when using them on the new file
systems (DOS and extended).
And, since they are linked as efficiently as possible (well, almost),
they consum ean absolute minimum of disk space. That's not something
to laugh at, considering the amount of space actually saved.
--
+ Jim Winstead Jr. (CSci '95)
| Harvey Mudd College
| jwinstea@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
+ This is all my words. Honest!