And that's the way Unix was before Linux. Solaris, Irix, BSD.. all had different implementations of the basic unix tools. You're actually referring to the GNU t

And that's the way Unix was before Linux. Solaris, Irix, BSD.. all had different implementations of the basic unix tools. You're actually referring to the GNU tools and not the operating system. Linux came along and everyone was using distros of Linux + GNU tools installed. You could in theory compile non-GNU tools and run a linux kernel and you'd be just as perplexed as running on a mac. PROTIP: you can take any modern OS (Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris) and compile/install the GNU utilities and get long arg support and have all the tools behave the same way. In fact, if you were building an OS from scratch your fasted bootstrap would be kernel -> compile the GNU tools -> distribute.