Re: The Terminal utility of OS10

[Travis Siegel]

Darwin is the heart of OSX.  OSX is based on FreeBSD which is one of  
three variants of bsd, the three being freebsd, NetBsd, and BSDI.   
They're all very similar, with minor differences in file structure  
and available utilities.  Very much like the various flavors of  
linux.  However, bsd is not linux.  You'll find things that are  
different, and things that are the same, but once you learn the  
basics, they'll translate quite nicely between all linux flavors.   
I've been using various unix based operating systems since 1988, and  
even with the majority of my experience coming on linux and bsd  
systems, I very easily passed a certification test for AIX which is  
IBM's variant, SunOs 9, which is of course Sun's unix, HPUX which is  
(of course) HP's variant, and solaris which is also a product of  
sun.  Sometimes there's very big differences, but there's enough  
similarities that if you know at least one system very well,  
extrapolating that knowledge to other systems is relatively simple.
I have used solaris and sun os, as well as aix hpux, xenix, all three  
bsds, and several different linux distros, but only a few of these as  
administrator.  Even so, I was able to pass all the certification  
tests, which tested administrator knowledge of the various flavors of  
unix.
The upshot of all of this is that once you've learned one unix,  
you're pretty well set  for all unix environments.  But, please keep  
in mind, linux is not what OSX is built on.  You'll only confuse  
people if you get the names mixed up.  I know it's close enough that  
it doesn't really matter, but some people only know one unix variant,  
and telling them something is based on that variant, then dropping  
them into the system to use it is only going to confuse them until  
they can figure out what's going on.