Quote:
Originally Posted by
Corona688
I doubt -- and hope -- their ksh isn't 100% compatible, since Solaris' usual idea of backwards compatibility is denying you all future features in the standard /bin/whatever, making you use /crazy/path/to/modern/whatever if you want them.
I understand your rant but don't confuse craziness to choice.
Solaris default PATH (
/usr/bin) is providing commands that do not break scripts when the OS is upgraded. This compatibility is not there to bother users but on the opposite a strong expectation from most customers and software developers.
When Solaris 2.x was launched, many users that were used to SunOS 4.x BSD syntax were confused. To avoid the break in their habits, they just had to prepend
/usr/ucb (University of California at Berkeley) to their path to get a BSDish CLI environment.
Similarily, if you expect commands to behave the GNU (i.e. Linux) way, you can now set your PATH to have
/usr/gnu/bin first. This is even the default, along with bash as login shell, for regular users with Solaris 11.
If on the other hand, you don't want the traditional Solaris behavior but a POSIX, standard conformant one, just have
/usr/xpg4/bin first in your PATH.
Finally, many commands located in
/usr/bin have been enhanced to support widely accepted still non standard options so your statement is much less valid with Solaris 11.