I wasn't saying that it was impossible to run them. I'm just commenting on an issue that was immediately apparent to me. If a program calls '/usr/bin/nc' and e

I wasn't saying that it was impossible to run them. I'm just commenting on an issue that was immediately apparent to me. If a program calls '/usr/bin/nc' and expect BSD options, it's not going to get them. "Replace GNU coreutils with BSD coreutils" is an option, but not one that everyone would be ready to jump at, because now things running on your Linux system that expect GNU options won't be getting them.