Here's a draft manual page. - Stephen
----
Standards, Environments, and Macros gnu(5)
NAME
gnu - GNU commands environment
DESCRIPTION
Because of their wide availability across various operating
environments, the FSF/UNESCO free software collection, including
the well-known products of the GNU project, form a commands
environment of equivalent or greater capability to those provided in
the default or any of the standards compliant included with the
present system. In an effort to offer a complete set of commands
environments, the present system includes portions of the
FSF/UNESCO free software collect under the label, "the GNU
environment". This environment is accessed by prepending the
directory, /usr/gnu/bin, to the executable path.
Similar to the XPG4 and XPG6 environments, if the behaviour of a
GNU command conflicts with the historical utility's behaviour, the
historical utility remains in /usr/bin; the GNU variant is provided
in /usr/gnu/bin. (In special cases, a copy of the variant,
prefixed with the 'g' character, may also be present in /usr/bin.
For example, /usr/gnu/bin/install is also provided as
/usr/bin/ginstall.) In cases where no historical equivalent was
previously provided, the GNU command will be present in both
/usr/bin and /usr/gnu/bin.
An application that wants to use GNU utility variants in preference
to all other utility variants on the system must set the
PATH (sh(1), ksh(1), bash(1), etc.) or path (csh(1), etc.)
environment variable as follows:
1. /usr/gnu/bin,
2. Remaining path components.
Various permutations of the path components outlined in
standards(5) are possible, including locating /usr/gnu/bin at
lookup postions other than the initial position. In these cases,
one or more groups of related utility variants are being preferred
over other commands environments' variants.
Similarly, the manual page lookup path, MANPATH, should insert the
value "/usr/gnu/share/man" in the appropriate order to prefer the
GNU commands reference manual pages over other implementations'
versions.
SEE ALSO
bash(1), csh(1), ksh(1), sh(1), standards(5)
Free Software Foundation, FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory, "All
GNU Packages", http://directory.fsf.org/GNU/.
NOTES
The FSF/UNESCO commands environment is delivered across a
collection of packages. These packages may be optional in some
installation scenarios.
--
Stephen Hahn, PhD Solaris Kernel Development, Sun Microsystems
stephen.hahn at sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/sch/
