Solaris

Pretty much nowhere by design, with the precise goal of preventing exactly what you're trying to do. All you're trying to do is inject little alternative utilities, but criminals use this method to inject compilers, daemons, and brute-forcing tools like expect onto otherwise clean systems.

So, an unavoidably bad idea. Sorry.

achenle, with linking grep would always be grep, no ggrep or anything else for that matter.
That being done to avoid defining shell variables for regular tools.
Best is to have one source script (where you define your enviroment as you see fit per OS requirment, link the tools etc.
The main script would never change, just the source one (for adding OS compatibility and such).

Is that wrong ?

As for -q and standards, i had no clue, it was just an example that things can be done without using additional switches which can be a problem on operating systems not conforming to standards.

Isn't tar -z switch actually non standard tar implementation ?
Tar is an archiver not a compresser as far as i know.

Regards
Peasant.

That is the issue you might want to fix in the first place. If these POSIX compliant utilities are causing problems, your script is non portable.

Moreover, you do not tell what shell interpreter you are using (legacy Bourne sh, ksh88, ksh93, bash, whatever) and you do not tell either where you define your aliases and how these definitions are passed to the scripts.

Neither tar nor cpio are in the standards. The pax utility is in the standards and can read and write archives in the formats used by both tar and cpio. The standards do not specify an option to have pax process compressed archives, but most implementations that provide the tar -z option or the cpio -z option also provide a pax extension to produce compressed archives in either format.