I was recently browsing my Fedora's /bin folder and noticed a binary named [. I did try to search the internet for more information on that, but I couldn't find anything useful. Running it through strace doesn't seem to produce anything useful for closer inspection too.What is that? Should I be alarmed? Could it be the result of a system compromise? Should I run it? Does it belong to any package?
What is the `[` program that resides in my system's /bin?
fedora;gnu;coreutils
The [ binary residing under the /bin tree in many GNU/Linux distributions is not something to be alarmed off. At least in my Fedora 19 it is a part of the coreutils package, as demonstrated below:$ rpm -qf /bin/[coreutils-8.21-13.fc19.x86_64and is a synonym for test to allow for expressions like [ expression ] to be written in shell scripts or even interactive usage.