OT: presence of strings and grep on other OSes

[John Macdonald]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 11:00:13AM -0400, Byron L. Sonne wrote:
> Hey All,
> 
> 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.
> 
> If anyone has any info, I'd love to hear it.

In the early '90s I was involved with a company that had a
large software suite that ran on a large number of varieties of
Unix systems.  Many of the Unix variants that we worked with
then are not around any longer, but AIX and HPUX still are
(we didn't work with DGUX).

We tended to use a minimal subset of the programs available
from the shell, and limited the choice of flags used.

grep was always around - but there could be some varietion
for the extra flag options

egrep was usually around - sometimes it was called grep -e

strings was only there sometimes, and varied significantly
in what it found, what it ignored, and what format it used to
display its output - we wrote our own

We kept with traditional sh syntax, not using the "new"
extensions of the Bourne shell, since those were inconsistantly
available.  (Nowadays, they'll be generally available, but
you'd have to worry that when you run "sh" you might get ksh
or bash instead of Bourne shell - they each have differences
in their more advanced extensions.)

There were many commands that we had to worry about because of
regional variations.  Sys V vs. BSD heritage was a large part
but each company was intent in adding its own unique value.

We wrote our own program to get "ls" info, because each company
played around with the output format, and there were many that
were broken when they got large values (they would overflow the
"column" extending with width and not leaving a blank before the
next column, for example).

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