Hi,

I recently started working with Solaris, and what I noticed is that a lot of commands I used to regularly use don't work, like sed -i and grep -r. I have found work arounds for these problems though but it's a pain in the ass.
I'm just wondering why they decided not to include these handy commands?

Each UNIX variant has commands that are unique to it, as well as many commands that work the same way that they do on other UNIX systems. Which variant were you working with before you started to use Solaris?

Those options are from GNU/Linux. Solaris isn't GNU.

It does have some GNU commands, though, in /usr/sfw/bin, including a ggrep which has a -r option. There is no "gsed" version, although I'm sure you could probably find one. Not that -i is a particularly sophisticated option!

That's the other way around. Gnu decided to add custom extensions to most of the standard Unix commands.
Solaris default commands are on the other hand much closer the the POSIX standard, you can even run strictly compliant alternatives should you need to in /usr/xpg|46]/bin.

Note that starting with Solaris 11, most of the Gnu commands are bundled with the OS in /usr/gnu/bin and the standard ones in /usr/bin are gradually including some of the previously Gnu only extensions.

Thanks for clearing that up! I worked with Debian and Red Hat before, I guess both use GNU.