On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 6:32 PM, Justin B Rye <edlug@xxx.xxx.xxx> wrote: > I'm sure people did plenty of esoteric things decades ago - but that > hardly explains what these executables are doing on my path today. > After all, I don't have gcc or binutils... I actually had a use for tsort a few months back for sorting nodes in a directed graph. It was easier to send the data to tsort than write my own sorting routine or hunt around for appropriate Perl or Python libraries. Since it can be used for sorting based dependency, it's useful for tracking whether dependencies between files and directories, so you can write a script that cleans up parent directories after moving or deleting files, for example. A lot of people are so used to doing things in scripting languages like Perl or Python that they forget that a lot of what they want to do can be done using shell scripts and the "tranditional" unix utilities. Anyhow, these utilities don't take up much space, they don't post any obvious security issues, so there's no problem in leaving them there. - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can find the EdLUG mailing list FAQ list at: http://www.edlug.org.uk/list_faq.html
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