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exiftool uses this method (among others) for many years. I'm surprised nobody mentioned this.

• JetSetIlly 6mo ago
  Yes, there are a few tools that do this. Looking at /bin and the softlinks that are there, the various xz tools do it (unxz, lzcat, etc.). Also, vim. vimdiff and view are just softlinks to vim. The only difference is that those tools have chosen easy to remember names rather than embedding the arguments as metadata in the filename. As a generalisation of the idea though, the blog post is neat.
  • blacklion 6mo ago
    exiftool can embed options to executable name, not only main mode of work like grep/egrep/zgrep — it is main difference. Like running `exiftoo(-k)` is equivalent `exiftool -k`.
    • JetSetIlly 6mo ago
      In that case I misunderstood. It's an interesting idea. I think I prefer the exiftool syntax over what's suggested in the blog. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.