http://www.osnews.com/story/15578/Standardising_UNIX_Command-Line_Tools Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2012, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:44:04 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread?154747 http://www.osnews.com/thread?154747 When dealing with a heterogenous environment (a mixture of Linux, BSD, Solaris, HP/UX, Macs, Windows), the easist way to make your life simpler is to just install the GNU command-line utilities on all of them (via Cygwin for Windows). The GNU stuff can coexist with the native tools, and then you don't have to remember slight variations in command-line switches for each system. Tue, 22 Aug 2006 17:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (JoeBuck) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?154777 http://www.osnews.com/thread?154777 I tend to create my own environment like this too, with a bunch of aliases and functions on every machine I use for all the regular things I do.

But the downside of that having someone ask me how to do something when I'm at their machine. Then I stand there trying to remember what my aliases really stand for. It makes me look like a fish out of water--which I am at that point. Tue, 22 Aug 2006 18:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (KenJackson) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?155023 http://www.osnews.com/thread?155023 I maintain a tool trying to solve this problem and more:

http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet

Puppet's lowest layer is a library that abstracts the differences in users, groups, filesystem mounts, or just about anything else; it's easy to add new types, and easy to add new backends for existing types (someone today just sent in support for up2date as a backend to packaging, in about 30 minutes of work with no prior experience).

In addition to the library, though, I've got a client/server architecture that makes it simple to manage a large number of machines using the same configuration (with a flexible configuration language that allows you to deal with all of the heterogeneity in your environment). Wed, 23 Aug 2006 02:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (lkanies) Comments