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At least in the early 90s, most of the support programs on the commercial unixes were ancient BSD stuff from 10 years previous and just sucked. No command line
by drewg123 5y ago
At least in the early 90s, most of the support programs on the commercial unixes were ancient BSD stuff from 10 years previous and just sucked. No command line editing, limited functionality, etc. This is why GNU became so incredibly popular. From the top of my head
- GNU tar did compression in one step with the "z" flag, native tar did not
- gzip compressed produced smaller compressed files than "compress" did, was usually faster, and understood stuff compressed via the vendor compress.
- gdb was much more usable that dbx or adb
- gcc was free, and supported much newer standards than the vendor compiler. And you had a much better shot at compiling stuff you found on the web without tweaking Makefiles to adjust compiler flags.
- pjmlp 5y agoOn the other hand, properly knowing UNIX/POSIX meant being confortable dropping into any random UNIX box at customer site and being able to sort out their problems without any kind of extra tooling.
- mynegation 5y agoThat is very true if it was the part of yours job description. For me it was not. I was face with a clean slate Solaris maybe twice during that period and each time I just had enough knowledge of BSD stuff, csh, and bare bones vi to bootstrap into the familiar environment (which was kind of fun, sort of like moving into a new home and making it cozy).
- pjmlp 5y agoMy job description was more of the kind "make customers happy". :)