this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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I'm going to assume you're not kidding, in which case, no, I mean the first letter of the command name it was called by.
There are already commands that do this. For example, on my machine,
exis the head of a symlink chain that leads to thevimtext editor's executable and if I runex,vimwill know that it was started with the nameexand will start inexmode.exwas an editor that worked in a different way but wasvim's ancestor, so backwards compatibility is built right in for those strange people who loveex, (or have some kind of automation reliance on it being present).Usually, the main command has a command line option that achieves the same effect as the special name. Here,
vim -eis the less clever way to startviminexmode.For
yes, symlinking the namenoto it and then calling that should arguably cause it to printnrepeatedly, but it doesn't, for historical reasons, hence my suggestion to go back in time and make it act differently.(None of this touches on the fact that the GNU philosophy wants nothing to do with clever tricks like this. They prefer to compile separate executables for each and every use case. For example, most Linuxes have
dirandvdiras variants of thelscommand. Their functionality could have been implemented through this symlink trick, but instead there are three near-identical executables taking up space instead.)