The alternatives command on Fedora-descended systems (RHEL, Scientific Linux, CentOS, etc.) permits two versions of the same utility to exist on a system at the same time by automatically switching links from a canonical path to the actual versioned path when necessary. Quite a few other system utilities have come to rely on it, namely the post-install section on quite a few RPMs call alternatives to set up parallel versions of things like language runtimes.
A quick demonstration:
[root@taco ~]# cat /opt/foo/this #! /bin/bash echo "I am this." [root@taco ~]# cat /opt/foo/that #! /bin/bash echo "I am that." [root@taco ~]# cat /opt/foo/somethingelse #! /bin/bash echo "I am somethingelse." [root@taco ~]# which thisorthat /usr/bin/which: no thisorthat in (/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/root/bin) [root@taco ~]# alternatives --install /usr/bin/thisorthat thisorthat /opt/foo/this 1 [root@taco ~]# alternatives --install /usr/bin/thisorthat thisorthat /opt/foo/that 2 [root@taco ~]# which thisorthat /usr/bin/thisorthat [root@taco ~]# ls -l /usr/bin/thisorthat lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 28 Mar 23 10:38 /usr/bin/thisorthat -> /etc/alternatives/thisorthat [root@taco ~]# ls -l /etc/alternatives/thisorthat lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 13 Mar 23 10:38 /etc/alternatives/thisorthat -> /opt/foo/that [root@taco ~]# thisorthat I am that. [root@taco ~]# alternatives --set thisorthat /opt/foo/that [root@taco ~]# thisorthat I am that. [root@taco ~]# alternatives --set thisorthat /opt/foo/somethingelse /opt/foo/somethingelse has not been configured as an alternative for thisorthat [root@taco ~]# alternatives --display thisorthat thisorthat - status is manual. Â link currently points to /opt/foo/that /opt/foo/this - priority 1 /opt/foo/that - priority 2 Current `best' version is /opt/foo/that.
So many other tools use alternatives that use of alternatives itself seems to have become a lost art. It may be that the popularity of this distro family has simply diluted the knowledge pool as the user ranks have swelled with newcomers who simply take the automation for granted. As with many convenience utilities, widespread success in one user generation can hamstring adoption and understand in the next.
It should be noted that alternatives is a system-wide command, so when root sets an alternative it affects everyone’s view of the system. This problem of binary or path-view alternatives has other, but very similar, solutions on other systems like Gentoo and Debian. Gentoo’s eselect system is a bit more sophisticated and can manage families of alternatives at once (links to a number of disparate language utilities which have to change in arbitrary ways based on which underlying runtime is selected, for example).