GNU Tools out of the box in Solaris 11

Leaving aside the performance improvements and re-engineering and architectural changes in Solaris 11, one of the significant and noticeable changes that comes along with Solaris 11 is the introduction of a lot of GNU tools out of the box. To make it even better, they replace the UNIX default versions.
This is my opinion is significant shift in approach from Sun (Oracle)  for good reasons allowing users, admins to use more powerful features of the GNU tools that were missing from the default versions.
To mention a couple,
1. With GNU find utility, you have more control on your ability to search with features like the depth of the directories in recursive searches.
2. With GNU tar utility, you can now tar and gunzip togethor in a single command.
All the installed GNU tools are under
/usr/gnu/bin
and the following is the list of GNU tools available out of the box with the default installation:
awk
basename
captoinfo
cat
chgrp
chmod
chown
chroot
cksum
clear
cmp
comm
cp
csplit
cut
date
dd
df
diff
diff3
diffmk
dirname
du
echo
egrep
env
eqn
expand
expr
factor
false
fgrep
find
fmt
fold
grep
grn
groups
head
hostid
id
indxbib
infocmp
infotocap
join
kill
link
ln
logname
ls
make
mkdir
mkfifo
mknod
mktemp
mv
ncurses5-config
neqn
nice
nl
nohup
nroff
od
paste
patch
pathchk
pic
pr
printf
pwd
refer
reset
rm
rmdir
sdiff
sed
sh
sleep
soelim
sort
split
stty
sum
sync
tail
tar
tee
test
tic
toe
touch
tput
tr
true
tset
tsort
tty
uname
unexpand
uniq
unlink
uptime
wc
which
who
whoami
xargs
yes

2 thoughts on “GNU Tools out of the box in Solaris 11”

  1. All the GNU tools do is add code bloat with unnecessary features and move away from the philosophy of doing one thing well. There isn’t anything you cannot do with the old UNIX/BSD core utilities that the GNU tools do. They do make things a little more convenient and easier which lowers the bar for system administrator competency.

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