topic Re: awk in Operating System - HP-UX

awk

SO_1 — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:08:16 GMT

Waht is the difference beetween
/sbin/awk & /usr/bin/awk ?
besides exec size :
# ll /sbin/awk /usr/bin/awk
-r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 598016 Mar 11 2004 /sbin/awk
-r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 180224 Aug 27 2004 /usr/bin/awk

Re: awk

Mark Greene_1 — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:15:06 GMT

# file /sbin/awk
/sbin/awk: PA-RISC1.1 shared executable
# file /usr/bin/awk
/usr/bin/awk: PA-RISC1.1 shared executable dynamically linked

What OS version and patch level do you have?

mark

Re: awk

A. Clay Stephenson — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:17:16 GMT

The difference between utilities in /sbin and those in /usr/bin is that the /sbin versions are statically linked. This make them less efficient in memory use BUT makes it possible for them to execute before shared libraries (generally found in /usr/lib) are available because the filesystems that house them have not yet been mounted. Important utilities that are needed in single-user mode are statically linked and placed in /sbin.

Re: awk

TwoProc — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:18:16 GMT

If you do a "what" command on each of them I think you'll find that they are both the same version. I would think that the one in /sbin/ is fully linked, and the one in /usr/bin/ uses shared modules (like demand load libraries) at run time. That would explain the difference in executable size. This would be useful b/c HP boxes don't come up in single user mode with /usr mounted. So, it's part of the tool set for admins (sbin probably stands for system bin) which would presumably be mountable during single user operations while the /usr partition is being worked on, or unavailable for whatever reason.

Re: awk

Sandman! — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:38:25 GMT

Hi,

Doing an ldd on the awk executables should confirm that one is statically linked and the other is dynamically linked.

# ldd -v /sbin/awk
<...should say not a shared executable>

# ldd -v /usr/bin/awk
<...should show the shared library dependencies>

cheers!

Re: awk

SO_1 — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:02:59 GMT

Thank you everybody,

I was expecting something like that
but I was not sure because on Solaris there is awk & nawk in several places, with each a different behavior...
I'll chose /usr/bin/awk to put in my scripts

Re: awk

A. Clay Stephenson — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:16:49 GMT

Then you should have asked your question like that. Under HP-UX awk is nawk. After all, n(ew )awk has been around now for decades.

Re: awk

TwoProc — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:24:10 GMT

How did a rabbit get assigned with no points?

Re: awk

A. Clay Stephenson — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:35:56 GMT

It's not a bug; it's a feature. Closing a thread automatically assigns a Bunny Wabbit.