Here's one of my Linux peculiarities: I don't like initrds. Not becausethey're inefficient or anything like that, but because they are anothermoving part in an already complicated boot process. Worse, they aregenerally a black box moving part; it is pretty difficult to peer insidean initrd to see what it is doing and to make sure that it is correct.

In fact, initrds are so hard to inspect and manipulate that almost noone does, not even distributions. Instead initrds are

The Unix test program makes for a great illustration of the aestheticimportance of syntactic sugar, to go along with its pragmatic effects . Consider the following two shell script lines:

if test -f /some/file; then ...

if [ -f /some/file ]; then ...

In any Bourne shell environment worth its name, these two haveexactly the same results and in fact run exactly the same program(or an imitation of it ), because [ is just another name for test