Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!leah!wfh58
From: wfh58@leah.Albany.Edu (William F. Hammond)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: COMPRESS
Summary: Which uses less memory in this case?  A link or an alias?
Message-ID: <2176@leah.Albany.Edu>
Date: 20 Nov 89 23:34:54 GMT
References: <9980.AA9980@heimat>
Organization: Dept of Math & Stat, SUNYA, Albany, NY
Lines: 29

In article <9980.AA9980@heimat>, sneakers@heimat.UUCP (Dan "Sneakers" Schein) writes:
. . .
> >
> >the flag is '-d'. rather than making a copy of the compress command,
> >you may find it easier to just make an alias for uncompress which
> >invokes compress with the appropriate flag.
> 
>   Would the world not be a better place if we could simply (ala Unix) link
>   'uncompress' to 'compress'? Somehow in my warped mind I think so.
> . . .
>     {pyramid|rutgers|uunet}!cbmvax!heimat!sneakers
*****
It seems to me to be a question of whether a linking arrangement would
use more or less memory than
                             alias uncompress  compress -z 
where 'z' is the correct flag.  Since the linking system is hypothetical,
I don't know the answer.  But my guess is that the alias would be more
memory efficient.  Execution speed is not a serious issue when the user
is interactive.  (That is, unless link references are incredibly slow, since
both things will happen very fast from the interactive user's perspective.)
And if it's being done in a script, ...

Links would be useful for other applications that I know of in high end
systems.  < Defensive comment.  I'm not arguing against links.
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William F. Hammond                   Dept. of Mathematics & Statistics
518-442-4625                         SUNYA
wfh58@leah.albany.edu                Albany, NY 12222
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