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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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. :-(

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.

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