Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Not necessarily.

You could go the way of busybox or uutils and have a single binary with many hard links. So 'ls', 'wc', 'grep', etc can all point at a single executable which dispatches to different functionality based on argv[0].

Then you can even share code between the binaries, which should make them even smaller.



ls and grep are in /bin on my system. wc, coming from coreutils is in /usr/bin. But that's really only a small part of /usr/bin.

$ dpkg -L coreutils | grep -c /usr/bin 76

Are you suggesting that all of e.g. GNOME should be a single program?


Why hard links over symlinks?


So someone doesn't unlink the main binary when they are cutting unused utils to save space.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: