alison@sdf.lonestar.org (alison) writes:
> At work i have used primarily Digital UNIX 4.0 and Debian Linux, with
> the occasional addition of SVR4.  Of these, decosf has been by far the
> sexiest OS.

For your information, many of the utilities you probably like in DU
actually came out of older BSD source trees.  If i recall correctly,
much of the user-land code base came from a pre-4.4BSD (4.4-alpha, if
i recall) member of the BSD family tree.


> My simple question is this: does NetBSD (or any BSD, for that matter)
> have its own utilities, or is it mostly a separately-licensed kernel
> with lots of Gnu utilities a la Linux?  By this i mean, does it have
> "traditional" tar, compress, bc/dc, cc, ls, mv, rm, sh, cat, awk, grep,
> ed, ex/vi, sed etc. without all the Gnu "enhancements"?

the problem with these is that the original implementations of these
are licensed, not freely available sources.  Some were reimplemented
by the folks at Berkeley, but for some the only reasonable free
alternative is the GNU code.

'vi' in particular is one that tends to drive people nuts on Linux.
For vi, we use 'nvi', the clone written by Keith Bostic (one of the
Berkeley CSRG guys).  He went out of his way to be bug-compatible with
traditional vi.



cgd
-- 
Chris Demetriou - cgd@netbsd.org - http://www.netbsd.org/People/Pages/cgd.html
Disclaimer: Not speaking for NetBSD, just expressing my own opinion.