4 ms·

Exactly this, and then all those hyper specific pieces of Linux software would get picked between distros and eventually became common, and well, that's history

Exactly this, and then all those hyper specific pieces of Linux software would get picked between distros and eventually became common, and well, that's history. I got into Linux after it had beaten out BSD for popularity, but having ran into the BSD versions of some utils on macOS, yeah, the GNU variants are far superior in almost every regard. Darwin's variant of dd still doesn't even accept the status=progress flag(or any equivalent), for instance.

School-Cotton 5y ago
That’s valid in many cases, but the dd example isn’t really fair, because you’re comparing modern GNU to ancient BSD. I don’t know how often macOS pulls from upstream FreeBSD, but I will say that relatively recently I saw a man page in macOS that still referred to ARPANet… Today’s FreeBSD does support status=progress as can be seen here: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/watch-status-of-running-dd-disc-clone.71958/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/watch-status-of-running-d...
- p_l 5y ago
  MacOS only pulls fragments from Free/NetBSD, and in many places it's still OSFMK showing up on the surface, so sometimes you find out that you need to program as if you were on BSD 4.3 Reno still...
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    And that is enough to be UNIX (TM).
- chris37879 5y ago
  Ah, I was unaware (but should have assumed) it was an ancient version. Sadly, though, that's the only exposure to BSD I and many others have.
fanf2 5y ago
Press ctrl-T while dd is running to sent it SIGINFO. IIRC dd status=progress was added so that dd would have something like ctrl-T on non-BSD systems. Linux lacks SIGINFO so it isn’t very widely known, nor are there many 3rd party programs that support it.
- chris37879 5y ago
  On linux either SIGUSR1 or 2, I forget which, will do it too, it's mostly just an annoyance with there not being a flag for it. The only signal I can reliably remember is to quit programs...

School-Cotton 5y ago

That’s valid in many cases, but the dd example isn’t really fair, because you’re comparing modern GNU to ancient BSD. I don’t know how often macOS pulls from upstream FreeBSD, but I will say that relatively recently I saw a man page in macOS that still referred to ARPANet… Today’s FreeBSD does support status=progress as can be seen here: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/watch-status-of-running-dd-disc-clone.71958/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/watch-status-of-running-d...

p_l 5y ago
MacOS only pulls fragments from Free/NetBSD, and in many places it's still OSFMK showing up on the surface, so sometimes you find out that you need to program as if you were on BSD 4.3 Reno still...
- pjmlp 5y ago
  And that is enough to be UNIX (TM).
chris37879 5y ago
Ah, I was unaware (but should have assumed) it was an ancient version. Sadly, though, that's the only exposure to BSD I and many others have.

fanf2 5y ago

Press ctrl-T while dd is running to sent it SIGINFO. IIRC dd status=progress was added so that dd would have something like ctrl-T on non-BSD systems. Linux lacks SIGINFO so it isn’t very widely known, nor are there many 3rd party programs that support it.

chris37879 5y ago
On linux either SIGUSR1 or 2, I forget which, will do it too, it's mostly just an annoyance with there not being a flag for it. The only signal I can reliably remember is to quit programs...