OT: presence of strings and grep on other OSes

[Francois Ouellette]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lennart Sorensen" <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>
To: <tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org>
Sent: Friday, September 16, 2005 11:03 AM
Subject: Re: [TLUG]: OT: presence of strings and grep on other OSes


> On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 11:00:13AM -0400, Byron L. Sonne wrote:
> > Not sure where else to turn, so I thought I'd ask you folks. I'm looking
> > to dig up information about how much I can rely on the presence of
> > strings and grep being present on some of the other unices out there,
> > such as AIX, HPUX, DGUX, etc. Older versions too. In some cases, egrep
> > is present and grep is not.
>
> I know I encountered an old slackware install a few years ago where grep
> didn't support -r which I found rather frustrating.  Other systems would
> most likely not be using gnu grep, although sometimes you get lucky (at
> least on solaris since many solaris admins hate the sun tools and prefer
> the gnu tools, and they want a compiler).
>
> I would think all unixes have grep although probably nowhere near as
> featureful as gnu grep.  strings I have no idea about.
>
> Lennart Sorensen

I have found 'grep' and 'strings' on all UNIX platforms I used, including
HP-UX, Tru64, AIX, Solaris... except the flags vary so if you write shell
scripts that need to be portable you need to be careful! Most software
products use 'make' or 'awk' scripts to conditionnally generate shell
scripts during installation in order to comply to each platform's
environment.

Best thing would be to visit the support pages from the vendors (many have
online 'manual' pages or doc about their products) and check what's
available.

  François Ouellette
<fouellet-cpI+UMyWUv9BDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>

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