That's what Mark meant to say, anyway. The article is spot on. The title - lacking precision.

I'm not one of those GNU nazis who thinks any mention of "Linux" must be prefixed with "GNU/" but, here, we are talking specifically about core userland and, in my considered opinion, GNU owns when it comes to core userland and should be credited as such.

I can't think of single piece (package?) of software I use, admire, and depend on more than GNU Coreutils. Maybe Firefox. Maybe OpenSSH. Some days rsync(1).

I don't use Linux very often, either. My kids use an old Dell laptop that runs Ubuntu (they let me play with apt-get every once in awhile) and we have a couple of Fedora boxes at work. I use FreeBSD a lot. FreeBSD, FreeBSD, FreeBSD. FreeBSD everywhere, in fact. And I've been running MacOS X on my lap for a couple of years now. Which is, you know, more BSD.

And that brings me to the reason I wanted to comment on Mark's article in the first place:

The next generation is cutting their teeth on GNU/Linux, not Solaris. Sorry, BSD.

You can get the GNU without the Linux. Most GNU stuff runs fine on BSD and I think I remember Tim mentioning at some point that one of the first things he does on all that Sun gear he gets to play with is get a proper GNU userland setup. The problem is that you can't replace the core userland on most Unices with GNU's userland due to all the compatibility issues.

On both FreeBSD and MacOS X (with MacPorts), the GNU core utilities are installed with a frustrating "g" prefix. So cat is gcat, tail is gtail, sort is gsort and so forth. When I first encountered this heresy, I did this:

$ sudo su - root
# cd /usr/local/bin
# for f in g*; do gln -s $f `echo $f | gsed 's/^g//'`; done

Don't do that. There's a lot of FreeBSD stuff that will choke in various odd ways (all bad!) when GNU owns your PATH (sed was the most common culprit, if I remember correctly, and maybe make, too).

Instead, I added the following to my .bashrc (that travels everywhere with me):

# prefer GNU version of most core utilities (interactive shell only).
alias awk=$(type -p gawk gnuawk awk | head -1)
alias base64=$(type -p gbase64 base64 | head -1)
alias basename=$(type -p gbasename basename | head -1)
alias cat=$(type -p gcat cat | head -1)
alias cp=$(type -p gcp cp | head -1)
alias cut=$(type -p gcut cut | head -1)
alias date=$(type -p gdate date | head -1)
alias diff=$(type -p gdiff diff | head -1)
alias df=$(type -p gdf df | head -1)
alias du=$(type -p gdu du | head -1)
alias false=$(type -p gfalse false | head -1)
alias fmt=$(type -p gdu du | head -1)
alias head=$(type -p ghead head | head -1)
alias join=$(type -p gjoin join | head -1)
alias make=$(type -p gmake make | head -1)
alias md5sum=$(type -p gmd5sum md5sum | head -1)
alias mv=$(type -p gmv mv | head -1)
alias nl=$(type -p gnl nl | head -1)
alias paste=$(type -p gpaste paste | head -1)
alias printf=$(type -p gprintf printf | head -1)
alias readlink=$(type -p greadlink readlink | head -1)
alias rm=$(type -p grm rm | head -1)
alias seq=$(type -p gseq seq | head -1)
alias sha1sum=$(type -p gsha1sum sha1sum | head -1)
alias sleep=$(type -p gsleep sleep | head -1)
alias sort=$(type -p gsort sort | head -1)
alias split=$(type -p gsplit split | head -1)
alias tac=$(type -p gtac tac | head -1)
alias tail=$(type -p gtail tail | head -1)
alias tar=$(type -p gnutar gtar tar | head -1)
alias tee=$(type -p gtee tee | head -1)
alias touch=$(type -p gtouch touch | head -1)
alias tr=$(type -p gtr tr | head -1)
alias true=$(type -p gtrue true | head -1)
alias uniq=$(type -p guniq uniq | head -1)
alias uptime=$(type -p guptime uptime | head -1)
alias wc=$(type -p gwc wc | head -1)
alias who=$(type -p gwho who | head -1)
alias whoami=$(type -p gwhoami whoami | head -1)
alias yes=$(type -p gyes yes | head -1)

What that does, basically, is makes anything entered into an interactive shell session use GNU stuff if it's there. And since these are aliases set up in .bashrc, they have no effect on other programs launched from the command line or elsewhere (e.g., cron).

Lastly, if you need GNU's core utilities for a specific script, you can use the same alias technique (just put the ones you need in the script itself). The other way to use GNU stuff for specific scripts is to create a directory full of symlinks to the g* version (like we did in /usr/local/bin above) and then put that directory on your PATH, directly in the script:

PATH="/usr/gnu/bin:$PATH"

I typically try to keep my scripts to spec so its less of an issue there. We've standardized on GNU in the backroom at work, though, where we do a lot of ETL type stuff, and we use this technique. The thinking is that we can take the GNU userland to any platform in the future, whereas we'd be tied to certain kernel by any other userland.

So, yea. The GNU userland is killing the Solaris userland and all the other userlands, as planned. Linux gets a lot of credit for being a catalyst for that but GNU is extremely portable, feature rich, and well designed. It's not like this is a free ride on the Linux express.