UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Depending on your definition of "normal UNIX run app". If you want to run other Unix utilities on MacOS, at best you'll have to recompile from source. At worst you'll have to rewrite / modify, THEN recompile from source... it depends on the application.

The same pretty much goes for running MacOS specific software on another Unix machine.

Thx a lot for answering hmmm.... then, .app is only make for Mac OS X?

Every operating system is dependent on underlying hardware and OS-specific system call. Suggest you look at the GCC compiler....... cross-platform (and free!!)

www.gnu.org

I know this thread is a couple weeks old but I thought I'd clarify a few points for posterity.

As others have noted, the difference in the "cli" of MacOS X and other unix versions is no more than you would see between say solaris and NetBSD.

OSX's preferred filesystem (HFS+) is indeed case insensitive. It is also case preserving. You do have the option of using UFS instead but it isnt recommended. I suspect we will see a new OSX filesystem in the next year or so. Nevertheless, it takes no getting used to. Unless you have a driectory full of files whose only name difference is case (file File fIle and so on) then you never notice it. ls is still ls... and other commands work as expected grep FILE and grep file are NOT the same.

An "app" in OSX is usually either a carbon or cocoa GUI application. Carbon apps are legacy applications with minimal code changes to run under OSX (MSOffice, Adobe products etc...). Cocoa apps are ObjectiveC or Java applications that use the native ObjectiveC based frameworks derived from NeXT.

Carbon apps will likely never run on another unix, you would basically have to rewrite the whole thing. Cocoa apps can be ported to other OS's running GNUStep. In theory, this is easy, in practice it is not usually trivial.

Exactly. The filesystem is case-preserving and case-insensitive put the usual UNIX utils (including the shell) are not (and will never be).

MacOSX comes with 'tcsh' as default, but you can easily recompile 'bash' from source if you prefer.


dani++