[PLUG] Relationship between Mac and Linux

[Paul Heinlein]

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008, Matt McKenzie wrote:

>> If I open up the terminal, will all the commands in the Easy Linux 
>> Commands work exactly the same.  Remember, these are beginner linux 
>> commands.  Or is there some gotcha that I should be aware of?
>
> Mac OS X has Darwin as its UNIX core, which is BSD-ish. When you go 
> back far enough it derives from NeXTSTEP UNIX, which was Steve Job's 
> other project back in the 90s, and that was BSD based. You can still 
> see some of the NeXT lineage in the OS X file manager among other 
> places, if you switch the file view to three column mode, this is 
> exactly how NeXTSTEP did it.
>
> So to boil it down, when you open a terminal on OS X, it will be 
> BSD-ish rather than System V-ish (like most current Linux distros). 
> Most of the "beginner" Linux commands should work more or less (pun 
> intended). For example you would use "ps aux" instead of "ps -ef".

The newer BSD utils in Leopard (10.5) behave more GNU-like than those 
in Tiger (10.4). In fact, the very example you gave is one of the 
changes; I know, because I like "ps -ef" better than "ps aux" for some 
things.

In Tiger, "ps -ef" fails, but it will succeed in Leopard.

Furthermore, while ps/ls and the like are from the BSD side of things, 
the GNU version of several utilites are there, including tar, grep, 
m4, and make.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> www.madboa.com