I had a problem wherein running a script with an embedded ftp call would work in the login shell during integration testing and then fail with an unrecognized option error in cron during acceptance testing.
In solving this I discovered that RedHat, and therefore CentOS, ships with at least two ftp clients, /usr/bin/ftp ( which I thought I was using ) and /usr/kerberos/bin/ftp, which I actually was using. even though I had no inkling of its existence.
My question is why? Why are there two ftp clients provided in a single distribution and why is the kerberos version effectively made the default whereas one might reasonably assume that anything in /usr/bin/ is the standard ( and by inference default ) ftp client for the distribution? If kerberos ftp is intended to be the default ftp client then why is it not in, or at least linked to from, /usr/bin?
I just do not understand why these obscure distribution 'gotchas' are created in the first place, much less permitted to persist.