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Comment by davexunit | Hacker News Reader

Why do programs that only work on OS X always end up on lists of "Unix" programs?

OSX is unix, in the same way that Solaris or AIX is, but I'd have split them out in a separate section for OSX specific Unix software.

Exactly - OS X is Unix(tm), but davexunit's complaint is that the term "Unix commands" implies "commands that will work on all/most UNIX/POSIX systems", not "commands for a single OS that happens also to be a UNIX".

Which most likely only happens because the majority of HN users only know either GNU/Linux or Mac OS X as UNIX and never really used the big commercial ones.

Every time someone mentions here how POSIX and C are portable across UNIXes, I have recolletions of maintaining code full of #ifdefs to make it work across such "portable" systems.

Not to mention how nice the Makefiles used to be.

I agree with the complaint too but not only are many of these commands mac only but in addition to that, they are not less commonly used (ex vim). I feel like I could have gotten quite a few less commonly used tools by

    ls /usr/bin/|sort -R|head

In my opinion it was a poorly named article with just as poor content. Many of the descriptions of the commands were not good ("lsof: godlike"). Better descriptions could generally even be found automatically:

    man lsof|grep NAME -A1 -m1|tail -n1

You're being that guy.

Even easier way to get short descriptions of commands:

    whatis lsof
    apropos lsof

Much better than my way. Formatting is nicer and I was using GNU specific flags for grep. :-(

Agreed. Anything that is not part of the SUS or POSIX standards should be in a separate section indicating their origin/availability.

"The most common version of Unix (bearing certification) is Apple's OS X" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

Mac OS X being UNIX certified, does not mean all Mac OS X commands are available across all UNIX variants.

It rather implies that Mac OS X supports what UNIX certification requires, plus whatever extensions Apple does on top.

This was always the main issue with POSIX compatibility fragmentation across UNIX platforms.

Probably the same reason Linux users would put Linux programs on such a list — it's relevant to them and probably much of their audience.

And then they will be lost looking for then at an HP-UX shell, as an example.

Most of these "programs" are not installed by default on OSX by the way.

It's just as common to see linux only commands in posts like this.

The same question can be asked as to why Linux only tools always end up on the same list... or flags are used that are GNU only extensions...

They're actually BSD commands that you can find on BSD systems but people easily forget about BSD these days.

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