Quote:
Originally Posted by
ArpitRaj
[B]4. Is there any need of installing UNIX if I have Linux...
Linux is mostly not a UNIX for copyright reasons... It does support a great many UNIX system calls and utilities. If anything the biggest difference is how they kept enhancing the utilities while on many "true" unix systems they adhere to the standard to the letter without even extending it.
Solaris
echo, for example, doesn't support the
-n option, so Linux scripts using it won't work right on Solaris. And BSD
sed doesn't support escape combinations like
\n to mean a newline.
And a few utilities are radically different from their UNIX counterparts, like
date. In Linux, the date command has become a very useful date conversion utility, whereas in plain UNIX it can only read and set dates. This behavior is very hard to replace, and is often badly missed on UNIX systems.
And so on. Many GNU versions of UNIX utilities like sed, awk, and so forth have been enhanced to have almost no arbitrary line limit, where UNIX versions often can't deal with lines longer than 1 or 2 kilobytes.
System configuration is another kettle of fish. Linux systems aren't configured the same way as a lot of UNIX systems, but then, the many different varieties of UNIX often don't agree with each other on that either.
So it's not really black and white. You'll learn a lot of UNIX architecture and utilities by using Linux, but might need to work a little more strictly when you try to take that knowledge to an OS that actually calls itself UNIX-compliant.
12-18-2010
