On 29 Aug, Anand Kumria replied to:
> > IMO, it's better (and less effort) to adopt an approach that works
> > everywhere, then you'll never be nastily surprised. You can't install
> > fileutils on every unix box in the world (a lot which aren't running
> > Linux).
>
> Of course you can, if it is your box you put on what you think makes it
> useful. Hundres of thousands of boxes have Perl on them. Which OSes
> come with Perl as standard? Solaris does *now* (v8), others are following
> as well. But they didn't used to.
I strongly believe that it's better to aim for maximum portability, as
a rule. That's what standards are about.
OTOH, the GNU tools are generally better than the commercial tools, so
the sooner they become pervasive and `standard' the happier we'll all
be.
In the meantime, we all walk the line of choosing how much work to put
in to achieve portability. It's a case-by-case decision that has to be
made. Sometimes it's more important to just get something that works.
E.g., I still write Bourne shell scripts in preference to Korn shell
scripts, because ksh isn't omnipresent yet, even though it's better.
But I'm keen to make the transition.
luke
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