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Comment by _abox | Hacker News Reader

They're just different. It's a different OS. I agree some things don't make sense but some things on Linux don't make sense either. It's just a long heritage of things that have organically grown. Consider 'dd' for example, with its 'if=xxx' whereas other tools would use the format '-if xxx'.

But it's a different OS. Solaris tools were different from the GNU toolset. HP-UX' tools were very different (try compiling something on HP-UX CC lol). MacOS' tools are also different.

If you expect things to be GNU, use GNU/Linux. Or Hurd :) Or install GNU coreutils.

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They've been different for very long and this has been causing compatibility issues for very long. A minor annoyance for sure but as a mac user I frequently run into that and indeed installing gnu core utils is usually the proper fix. It's not just that it is different but that the maintainers seem indifferent to all this. It's petty and pointlessly different at this point. Would it be so hard to implement the missing flags?

> Consider 'dd' for example

This is a fair point, and I suppose something I just have grown used to, similar to how I can type `tar xvzf` without any `-` at all, and it works.

> MacOS' tools are also different.

Tbf when I talk of using BSD tools, I'm talking about using MacOS tools - I don't have any BSD installations, I just recognize that MacOS includes mostly (?) BSD tools by default.

I do in fact install coreutils, and either alias them or move PATH priority so they get called first.

> Tbf when I talk of using BSD tools, I'm talking about using MacOS tools - I don't have any BSD installations, I just recognize that MacOS includes mostly (?) BSD tools by default.

It's not inaccurate, but somewhat unfair to use MacOS tools and call them BSD tools. They are ports of BSD tools, but Apple rarely refreshes them from the original sources, so it's kind of a time capsule to 2000. If you dropped 2000 era Linux userland on someone today, there would be a lot of complaints and concerns. On some tools, command flags added in GNU coreutils do get added to FreeBSD, although I did not check your list of specifics.

IIRC, Apple periodically merges some kernel bits from FreeBSD and user space utilities from NetBSD. (Though I can’t find a source mentioning NetBSD, atm.) I don’t know why Apple would choose NetBSD utilities instead of FreeBSD if they are also using FreeBSD kernel bits.

I understand why Apple doesn’t bother to contribute to upstream FreeBSD or NetBSD, but I’m curious why they aren’t eager to merge updates from them more frequently.

> I’m curious why they aren’t eager to merge updates from them more frequently.

I suspect it's because the merge isn't easy to do; which is partially a self-fulfilling property of how infrequent it's done, but likely also has a lot to do with the pretty large differences in system design. A lot of the kernel bits are old as heck too; last I checked, at least the Darwin open source kernel doesn't have any protection against syn floods, which FreeBSD first addressed in kernel 4.5 (released January 29, 2002)

>This is a fair point, and I suppose something I just have grown used to, similar to how I can type `tar xvzf` without any `-` at all, and it works.

So for a while GNU tar didn't support automatic compression detection, and you had to manually specify 'z' or 'j' every time. Quite annoying when you are used to bsdtar, which does this for you.

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