And the fact is, when there's a piece of core that nobody uses, and has since been replaced by superior tooling, The Right Thing to do is to rip it out, ...The

And the fact is, when there's a piece of core that nobody uses, and has since been replaced by superior tooling, The Right Thing to do is to rip it out, ...The only way that could ever work without breaking existing software running in the wild would be for that superior tooling to be backwards compatible. SunOS (illumos) does this all of the time. For example, GNU options like -C have been added to SVR4 tar(1) on illumos, thereby enhancing, but not breaking existing functionality. Otherwise, how would you determine whether someone isn't using something, and that on every Solaris / illumos system on the planet? Have they optimized grep the way GNU did? I don't know about grep(1) in particular, we have fgrep(1) on illumos for that, which comes all the way from AT&T's SVR4. We also have egrep(1) in addition to grep(1). HP-UX for example, being a SVR4 system, has fgrep(1) and egrep(1) in addition to grep(1) as well. I use fgrep(1) every day; only when I need to use regular expressions do I use grep(1). I know cat(1)'s been optimised. If you're curious enough, you can check out Solaris's grep(1) code here: https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/tree/master/usr/src/cmd/grep_xpg4 https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/tree/master/usr/src/... Lupus in fabula: you can also see that the -H option has been added to grep(1), which illustrates my point that illumos does this all of the time[1]. I mean, it's not like Solaris still has ptrace or /dev/poll. ? % ls -l /dev/poll lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Jul 24 2013 /dev/poll -> ../devices/pseudo/poll@0:poll % man ptrace Standard C Library Functions ptrace(3C) NAME ptrace - allows a parent process to control the execution of a child process SYNOPSIS #include <unistd.h> #include <sys/types.h> int ptrace(int request, pid_t pid, int addr, int data); ... ... ... % uname -srpmi SunOS 5.10 i86pc i386 i86pc ...so I'm baffled by your statement. Did you mean to write the opposite? What were you actually trying to say? [1] https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commit/41599e9fdccb44cc5f17828ab04b3147cefcc4e0 https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commit/41599e9fdccb4...