[Nottingham] Solaris

[Peter Stokes]

Hi Roger


> > Only used Solaris for about 5 mins so far, I'm a total newb.
> 
> Just be aware that some Solaris commands are called the same as Linux ones but do different things. Case in point - killall. On Solaris this "kills all processes not directly related to the shutdown procedure". Not quite the behaviour you would expect coming from Linux!
> 
> You've got to love the different syntax for some commands as well. Why have
> 
> /sbin/shutdown -r now
> 
> when you could have
> 
> /usr/sbin/shutdown -i 6 -g 0 -y

Out of interest, this is (from memory) due to the change from the
original Solaris 1.X which was BSD based, over to the System V base in
Solaris 2. The Sys V command has the cryptic options, the BSD version
(which I guess is where Linux took its options from) has the more
friendly ones. When Sun released Solaris 2, they still included the BSD
commands, you can find them in /usr/ucb. So if you want to run the the
older BSD versions, simply change the path lookup order to include
/usr/ucb BEFORE the /usr/sbin etc.

My guess is that a lot of the basic commands in Linux will be based on
BSD as this was commonly used around the late 80's and early 90's.

All the best

Peter