I don't like everything the GNU project produces, but I do find that they tend to produce working software, at least among the stuff I commonly use. One of the

I don't like everything the GNU project produces, but I do find that they tend to produce working software, at least among the stuff I commonly use. One of the first things I do on non-Linux boxes is install GNU coreutils, because the alternative coreutil options (Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.) tend to be some mixture of slow and buggy. One of the things GNU got right in its early days, imo, was to declare "no hard-coded arbitrary constants". So GNU awk and sed don't crap out with messages like "awk: record too long" because your line was longer than some hard-coded buffer size. Also, everyone else's grep seems slow.