On Mon, 22 Jan 2007, Chad Walstrom wrote: >> The reason is that Linux has been really taking over in computing and >> everything is ready to compile and run under Linux. Linux uses GNU >> tools, which are much better than Solaris's tools. Because of this, I >> wouldn't bother with Solaris. > > "Better" is a very subjective opinion. I like GNU tools. I'm > familiar with GNU tools. I can hack on GNU tools and not worry about > Copyright infringement. Therefore, I think GNU tools are better. That's not how it is with me. I discovered that Solaris fmt was deleting international characters like é, ü, etc., from my files, which I feel is totally unacceptable. GNU fmt didn't do that. Both sed and awk under Solaris failed to handle long lines, and sed would screw up without returning an error -- this is a fairly famous bug in Solaris sed that you might want to read about. The GNU versions of both sed and awk (a.k.a., gawk) work great even with very long lines. I also discovered that the Solaris version of sort was much slower than the GNU version. This happened because a friend believed that his high-end PC running Linux would out-perform a Solaris box that cost 4 times as much money and he wanted to prove it. Some of our colleagues were saying that Solaris and SPARC would be faster when a job required a lot of I/O. So we decided to sort a file of several million lines to see which mahcine was fastest. The Linux machine was much faster. Then I realized that I could compile GNU sort under Solaris and see if that was the cause of the difference. It turned out that GNU sort was far faster than Solaris sort. I don't remember the numbers now but it was a remarkable difference. GNU tools have continued to improve and outdo the Solaris versions in many ways. It's not just what I know and like. In fact, I probably still have more experience in Solaris than in Linux. Mike