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Comment by evgen | Hacker News Reader

The stock OS X box comes with enough of the standard command-line toolbox that if you are actually writing a "portable" script you are not going to have a problem running that script on OS X. The biggest differentiator is probably that OS X is a part of the *BSD lineage and so you will need to do more tweaking of a Linux script to get it bsd-ready than you will need to tweak a standard bsd script to move it from FreeBSD to OS X. While macports is closer to the freebsd port system, it is close enough to apt-get that you should really have no problems switching from one to the other.

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It's been a few versions since I paid close attention, but as I remember OS X ships with only the bare POSIX tools, plus a few extras from the FreeBSD userspace. It lacks stuff like perl, python, curl, wget, ssh (maybe: not sure about that one), tcpdump, etc... That's all stuff the poor user is going to have to figure out how to get.

And as mentioned, the existing package systems for OSS software are really primitive. There's just no equivalent for, say, the Ubuntu synaptic tool for new users.

I'm not trying to make this into a flame war: clearly you can achieve a pretty solid command line experience in OS X if you know what you're doing. But you're never going to learn it there without a bunch of headaches if you don't already have that expertise.

I'm running Leopard right now, and I have python, perl, curl, ssh, and tcpdump. I have no idea why wget is left out of the default install, but I just get it with macports, which is just a download and double click install away. Anyone who would be using these tools wouldn't have any problem setting it up. A few revisions of OS X ago things did seem relatively odd to the average Bash user. The shell was tcsh, and being based on BSD everything felt a bit off to someone switching from Linux, but these days it's pretty much all there. You should give it another look if you get a chance.

wget is left out simply for licensing reasons. curl is an MIT license, wget is GPL.

edit: I second guess this now that I think about it. bash is GPL...

That is simply not true. Python is in /System/Library/Frameworks for example. OS X doesn't usually bother to imitate SysV, that's all.

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