Understanding the alternatives Command
alternatives (or update-alternatives) is a GNU-licensed command-line tool that provides functionality to create, remove, manage, and query symbolic links. In other words, it allows defining default versions or paths for specific commands through symbolic links. Note that Debian-based Linux distributions only provide the update-alternatives command (the original alternatives script was reimplemented to remove perl language dependency), and there are some differences in functionality compared to RedHat-based Linux commands, but this article covers only common functionality and options. Examples are based on RedHat. ...