"Standard" Unix utilities

[Jason Stephenson]

Tom Buskey wrote:
> Why didn't I see rename?  Aha. rename is a linuxism.  Or GNUism.  It's on
> linux.  It's on Cygwin.  It's not on Solaris.  It's not on Irix.
> 
> I don't have a BSD system to test, but it might be on that.
> I bet it's not on HP-UX or AIX.
>

jason at casanova:~$ uname -sr
FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE-p4
jason at casanova:~$ whatis rename
VOP_RENAME(9)            - rename a file
rename(2)                - change the name of a file
ldapmodrdn(1)            - LDAP rename entry tool

It's not available as a command on FreeBSD. Must be in the GNU fileutils 
collection.

> This is why many of us have reinvented the wheel so many times and keep
> things in our ~/bin :-(
> 
> You'll find the same things with unix2dos/dos2unix, pkill, killall, df
> (different options!), anything that looks at disk partitions, etc.

Watch out for killall! On some OS permutations it does exactly what it 
says: it kills all running processess! IIRC, it has this behavior on HP-UX.

> 
> Thankfully the Unix world has converged a bit.  People with OSS systems
> tended to put tools they needed into the standard distributions and they got
> propaged.  The commercial OS vendors started to follow suit with perl, bash,
> tcsh.  df in Solaris 10 finally has -h (does HP-UX 12.x have -k now?)

It has that option in Solaris 9, too. I'm not sure about 8, 'cause I 
never used 8. We went from 7 to 9.

> 
> I think we'll see further merging with OpenSolaris.

One of the first things that I often do when setting up a new Solaris 
machine is to install the GNU fileutils, gcc, and several other packages.

Cheers,
Jason