I recall waay back on Jan 30 when Dan Papasian wrote: > GNU tools: Which ones, and why replace the existing ones? > Do you know/care if you have GNU find vs BSD find?
This is no big deal (find). On the other hand, I'd really like to have GNU 'ls'. It has a very nicely formatted help screen without hitting the man pages (like most modern GNU utils) and it also does color. BSD may do color with its 'ls' but I didn't see it mentioned anywhere. > Can you even tell the difference between GNU cp and BSD cp? Specifically cp, YES (bad example =). This is one of the things that kind of irked me when I was first learning FreeBSD -- cp in BSD has no "-a" option, so I have to do "cp -pvR". I know, it's silly, but it is kind of nice. Also I found the cp will not copy device files unless I do something special (dunno what it would be?). "cp -a" in Linux was nice for making an exact duplicate of a tree since it preserved basically everything. Anyway, those are just examples. There are some BSD utils that are sure to be superior to the GNU equivalents, the question is whether it's worth the effort (either way) to pick and choose. Probably not.... given that BSD's kernel is wedded to its utils, it's likely that the BSD utils would win out (unless you explicitely replaced them). I think this is one of the ideas behind the Debian 20 kitchen sinks paradigm though. Install the base and replace the parts you want to replace. -- Administration: An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president. -- Ambrose Bierce
