Porting Unix Command-Line Tools to Mac OS X

An anonymous reader writes "Over at Apple has posted a technote on porting Unix programs to Mac OS X. Nothing earth-shattering, but nice to see it all collected."

Comments

Re:what's the point?

[Matthias Wiesmann]

do you really think they , mac users , will accustom them to m4 , groff , epn etc or anything built upon them?

Actually, there are many nice OS X applications that are build around unix programs:

• Texshop is a wrapper around Latex.
• cocoaspell is a wrapper around the Unix spell checker aspell
• GPG Mail is a wrapper around the Gnu PGP implementation so that Mail.app can handle PGP.

Those are just the first that came to my mind, there are many others. The fact that program interfaces are different does not mean that porting applications and components is useless, it simply means that a new interface will be needed.

The intersting thing is that the service menu is something very Unixish, many command line utilities would make good services. For those that don't know OS X, services are components that take the current selection and apply some treatement on them. There are services that search google, do text transformation, ec...

Unix tools... already ported!

[1155]

Well, if your a unix head, using a mac, and have been under a rock for a long time, here ya go


http://www.osxgnu.org/ Go here for packages to install.

http://fink.sf.net Wow, apt-get for os x

http://finkcommander.sf.net Wow, a gui for fink

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/x11for macosx.html An x11 server that uses quartz extreme (or whatever you want to call it)


There are many other things to use, too

Re:Unix tools... already ported!

[goon america]

Apple keeps some contributed ports for download here:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_so urce/

Re:what's the point?

[jo_ham]

I use GPG Mail with Mail.app and it's great, combined with GnuPG for OS X.

I also use Tiny Fugue in the terminal to connect to a journal community chat server. You need Apple's free Developer Tools to build it though, but it works perfectly.

I also use NcFTP for all my ftp needs. It used to be included with 10.1.x, but Apple stopped shipping it with 10.2.x, instead favouring the basic BSD ftp, which they improved in Jaguar. I prefer NcFTP though, and had no problems building it from source with the Developer Tools.

The huge bonus I've found with OS X's terminal is the way it integrates with the "consumer" side of the OS making command line work more conveinent. For example, if I'm not in the mood to drill down into a directory to upload a file in NcFTP I can just drag it onto the terminal after typing "put [space]". I can also command+click links in TF to open them in my browser. These tricks work in the shell too, often handy for perfoming operations on files deeper in directories that I don't want to navigate to by typing them out. (Yes, yes, I'm lazy).

Re:So

[WatertonMan]

A lot of porting is done by Apple employees. Just not necessary at Apple's request. This limits how much support Apple has to provide for these opensource projects and also limits their liability if something goes wrong. Quoting from the opendarwin page, "many OpenDarwin members are either Apple employees or Darwin Committers, who have an active interest in merging technologies from OpenDarwin.org into Darwin and Mac OS X releases. With OpenDarwin, project members have greater latitude in producing incremental updates or interim releases of Darwin. The mission of the OpenDarwin project is to innovate and explore new technologies while still remaining relevant, through its informal connection to www.opensource.apple.com, to the mainstream computing environments that Apple provides. It complements Apple's infrastructure by allowing increased participation by the community."

As to the choice of BSD or GNU standard tools, that's a bit of a personal preference. However since Darwin is based on BSD (with a lot of FreeBSD of late) rather than Linux it shouldn't be surprising that it retains its tools. That is more in keeping with its BSD roots.

As I mentioned elsewhere if you are savvy enough to recognize the difference in the tools you ought to be savvy enough to build the GNU versions of the tools.

For those who don't like fink...

[daveschroeder]

At the same time, I don't want to mess with Fink, it introduces complexity. For example, having two sets of binaries in different places doesn't mean you can run shell scripts without changing them if they were written expecting one set to be somewhere it isn't.

DarwinPorts

DarwinPorts FAQ

Interview with Jordan Hubbard on DarwinPorts (Slashdot article)

Re:its about iTime.

[Van Halen]

This is just an update of an older document, probably for Jaguar. Checking my bookmarks, the old url is now gone. I recall checking it in the last few weeks, so clearly it was just moved and updated.

Re:Interesting hedge

[dadragon]

"Currently" supported? What does that mean?

It means that at one time, there were more archs supported. NeXT/Open Step ran on ix86, m68k, powerpc, mips, sparc, etc.

It doesn't seem like such a stretch to assume that other architectures are officially not out of the question, with a hedge statement like this one. Very interesting...

I wouldn't be too surprised if Apple has most of those running internally. I also wouldn't be too surprised if they release a server based on something that isn't powerpc, but the client is out of the question.

I also wouldn't be too surprised if an unreleased version of Windows 2003 Server runs on PowerPC and MIPS.