Is there a difference between GNU and BSD Coreutils? | Hacker News Reader

Is there a difference between GNU and BSD Coreutils?

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3 pointsOwenGrumbles3 comments

I was wondering if there really is a huge difference between GNU coreutils and BSD coreutils. I was wondering because lots of linux applications have been ported to freebsd, and I was wondering if ports have to take a huge amount of time out of there day rewriting to use BSD coreutils. And if i was to switch, how much would my workflows be impacted. (Technical Answers Welcome)

The one example I'm familiar with is sed and it's in-place edit option (-i). It's available in the GNU coreutils option, but not in the BSD coreutils. You can work around the lack of -i by directing sed's output back to the file.

There are some.

For example BSD ls(1) is not able to list dirs first.

Other thing is that BSD utils are more strict ... like:

    # command -o -p -t -i -O -n -s ARGUMENTS

If you do it other wise - like that:

    # command -o -p -t ARGUMENTS -i -O -n -s

... they will just throw error - but its all documented in the man pages.

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