Date:	Thu, 14 Nov 1996 13:28:40 +0200 (IST)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To:	Thomas Demmer <demmer AT LSTM DOT Ruhr-UNI-Bochum DOT De>
Cc:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: /ln/mkfifo/mknod
In-Reply-To:	<328ADF88.41C6@LSTM.Ruhr-UNI-Bochum.De>
Message-Id:	<Pine.SUN.3.91.961114131847.7754E-100000@is>
Mime-Version:	1.0

On Thu, 14 Nov 1996, Thomas Demmer wrote:

> I grabed the GNU fileutils and found the files
> ln, mkfifo, and mknod. Can somebody enlighten me
> about which particular use this things have under
> DOS?

ln mkfifo and mknod (and also chown and chgrp) are primarily for those
Makefiles and shell scripts which might call them.  The ports are made so
that they pretend to be working, but do little actually, sometimes nothing
at all.  E.g., "ln foo bar" copies foo to bar, which is functionally the
same, but chgrp doesn't do anything at all, and so is "chmod +x foo". 

This way, you don't have to edit Makefiles which come from Unix.  For
instance, I've just build Ispell for DJGPP v2, including the dictionaries,
which would be impossible without ln, chmod and other programs.

ln also has one DJGPP-specific goodie: it knows about DJGPP symlinks to 
executables.  Try this:

	ln -s c:/djgpp/bin/grep.exe c:/djgpp/bin/fgrep.exe

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