Can we get rid of that 'g' infront of every command

Dagobert Michelsen dam at opencsw.org
Wed May 21 10:30:37 CEST 2014


Hi Panos,

Am 20.05.2014 um 17:48 schrieb Panos Kavalagios <Panagiotis.Kavalagios at eurodyn.com>:
>     I don't know where to send it and you might not be the correct person, but I have a question. 

Sure.

>     Why we keep those 'g' prefixes for all GNU commands? I know it is a Solaris tradition to distinguish the native implementation of the OS from the GNU, but is it really needed?

The reason is that if you have /opt/csw/bin in front of your path you would cloak the Solaris commands
which is bad.

> All other systems do not use that distinction. It is really irritating to have either alias all commands (alias ls gls) or create a symbolic link (ln -s gfind find) to have something working on all operating systems. Even Sunfreeware did not provide that prefix for the /usr/local packages of coreutils, findutils, diffutils etc. When the package is compiled itself it produces an executable without the 'g'.
> 
>     I apologise if my question looks naive and there is an obvious explanation. I just wish to be able to only add in my PATH /opt/csw/bin, without having to perform any other extra configuration.

For this reason we have symlinks with the usual name without ‚g‘ in /opt/csw/gnu which is
shipped by each package. Just prepend that path as documented here:
  http://www.opencsw.org/manual/for-administrators/setup.html?highlight=gnu#symlinks-in-opt-csw-gnu


Best regards

  — Dago

-- 
"You don't become great by trying to be great, you become great by wanting to do something,
and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process." - xkcd #896

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