Yeah, which again is odd... Easily could be done with an alias or a soft symlink, but they chose to do it this way instead, I wonder what the reasoning is..

Cool

Huh. I guess Patrick didn't think it was a good reason. I can't find dir or vdir on my system - just a man page to all three and I couldn't figure anything from it that would indicate what was up. This is really weird. I can't find them in the system and I can't find an alias, but the commands work. I can't find anything in the bash man - I got to thinking maybe it was a builtin in 2.05b or something. What am I missing? vdir even prints out a funky display, like with preset options, which the man page says both are supposed to have. But if they function differently, they can't be hard links *either*. Or can they?

Maybe it's just a test to keep us on our toes.

8.1 doesn't have it, at least not from the set of packages I installed. I was quite happy to see I didn't have it too

Cool

Yeah but, if it isn't a builtin or alias, I thought it had to be an actual file. How's it executing? What's executing? I even tried the info pages to see if it said anything different.

Wait - I just backgrounded and foregrounded vdir and got
[1]+ Done /bin/ls $LS_OPTIONS --format=long

And dir gives
[1]+ Done /bin/ls $LS_OPTIONS --format=vertical

But where are *they* coming from? Oddly, when I 'su' the command's not found for root, but when I 'su -', it is. And the path differences are trivial - numerous, but trivial.

It was kind of a funny novelty at first but this is starting to bug me. Ah well. I suppose there are more important things to figure out.

Post up:
env

Cool

The whole thing or a particular part?

Anything specific to LS bit would be cool...

Cool

LS_OPTIONS= --color=auto -F -b -T 0

Other than LS_COLORS, that's the only LS or OPTIONS and is the same for user and root.

that is the one cool feature of ls that dir just can't do, is colorization of filenames, relevant to their type. Makes it much easier to see what the files are, as a lot of files, you can't tell whether they're files or directories.

Weird that you can't, since they're the 'same' things, but I couldn't get it to do it, either. -F does append symbols at the end of the filenames indicating major categories, though, which does make it easier than sorting out the permissions at the front of 'ls -l'.