4 ms·
If you are along time GNU user (meaning GNU grep, sed, less, awk, find, tar, etc., etc.) this will be way more frustrating than you realize to use. Having live
by krupan 3y ago
If you are along time GNU user (meaning GNU grep, sed, less, awk, find, tar, etc., etc.) this will be way more frustrating than you realize to use. Having lived in the UNIX days, I can still remember the subtle differences in all the command-line tools driving me nuts. This is actually how the GNU tools became popular even before Linux was a thing, you could install them on irix, hpux, sun, any UNIX, and you wouldn't have to deal with the quirky differences between hpux grep and irix grep (for example).
- Rediscover 3y agotar(1) was the command that often bit back at me across the different Un*x implementations, vs awk(1) which for some unknown reason I had internalized the most miniscule differences. I got into the habit of immediately installing gtar on any Solaris box I had root on (damn the leading "/" in the archive). ----- The 2nd worst part was dealing with SunOS and HP/UX at work and Ultrix outside of work. Worst part was not grokking why MS-DOS wouldn't buffer keystrokes the few times I was exposed to it.
- lucideer 3y agoIf the APIs of CLI utils is the primary concern, it's worth noting that they say their core userland is provided by "FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD" - so any friction here should in theory just be equivalent to the friction of using a BSD today (or Mac).
- q66 3y agoit's solely FreeBSD as an upstream for us, though Net/Open are an upstream for FreeBSD itself for some tools the tools have made big strides over the last few decades, so it's nowhere near like it used to be back then
- pjmlp 3y agoI do confess having installed the GNU ports on Solaris multiple times. Unfortunely Aix and HP-UX servers were out of my control, thus scripts had to stay POSIX compatible for anything that had to run across all our servers, or written in Perl.
- simonh 3y agoOh sure, I still remember getting my first 1/4” tape of the GNU tools source code through the post. This is why it’s so hilarious to me when the kids nowadays complain that MacOS has different command line tools to Linux. “Why can’t they just use GNU?”. Get off my lawn! ;)
- pjmlp 3y agoAlso why when on a macOS system I never felt the urge to install Homebrew or something similar, it is just another UNIX flavour.
- maleldil 3y agoHow do you usually install software? Always building from source? It's interesting to say that it's "just another UNIX flavour" when the most common flavours today all have some form of package management.
- pjmlp 3y agoTurns out there is plenty of commercial software, and UNIX tools in the box are more than enough for my workflows.
- Naijoko 3y agoisnt the macos system called NOT UNIX ? ^.^
- pjmlp 3y agohttps://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3700.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3700.htm
- igorguerrero 3y agoThis is still the case for example GNU Awk vs OSX (BSD?) awk
- shpx 3y agoAnd for dd, where it's bs=4m on macOS originally but changes to bs=4M if you install coreutils. I think you can write out the number bs=4000000 if you want a portable command. This argument is effectively mandatory as it speeds up file transfers like 4 times in my experience over the default block size.
- viraptor 3y agoI still find it weird / annoying that those commands don't get installed with prefixes by default. At least for awk it's common to have gawk, mawk, etc. installed explicitly. I wish it was common to similarly have bsdtar, gtar, etc. At least in nixpkgs it's easy to reference the right version explicitly for each context, but everything else is a just guessing.
- LeFantome 3y agoIf you use the AUR, you are going to see bsdtar a lot.