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Porting Unix Command-Line Tools to Mac OS X

Posted by pudge on from the mmmm-command-lines dept.

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."

2 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Unix tools... already ported! by 1155 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Re:So by anothy · · Score: 5, Insightful
    first:
    I have been annoyed on several occassions that the BSD command line utilities Apple provides lacked some feature that the GNU utilities have (I recall just replacing Apple's 'ls' with the GNU equivalent outright).
    then, in the very next sentance:
    At the same time, I don't want to mess with Fink, it introduces complexity.
    and, just to close it up:
    I'd much rather that Apple just installed the GNU stuff by default.
    man! i've got mod points, and i almost moderated this funny, but i wanted to make sure people got it. you don't want extra complexity, but you prefer the GNU tools to the BSD tools? y'er kiddin', right? how on earth can anyone make sense of that? the GNU tools are, on average, dramatically more complicated than the BSD tools. i used to build Linux boxes that dumped the GNU tools in favor of the BSD tools. then i got annoyed with the GNU C library and tried swapping that out. halfway through the project of rebuilding everything so that it didn't have the stupid glibc dependancies, i got fed up and went back to a BSD system - because the tools were so much simpler. Apple made a great decision in using the BSD tools rather than the GNU tools (license questions aside).

    oh, and as a parting kick:
    ...in Linux you can just assemble your system to do what you want.
    right. yup. unless you want it to be a good desktop system.
    --

    i speak for myself and those who like what i say.