Unix and Linux Stack Exchange
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Questions tagged [gnu]

GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project. The founding goal of the project was, in the words of its initial announcement, to develop "a sufficient body of free software [...] to get along without any software that is not free.

The GNU logo, by Etienne Suvasa

The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on September 27, 1983, by Richard Stallman at MIT. It initiated GNU operating system development in January, 1984. The founding goal of the project was, in the words of its initial announcement, to develop "a sufficient body of free software [...] to get along without any software that is not free." To make this happen, the GNU Project began working on an operating system called GNU ("GNU" is a recursive acronym that stands for "GNU's Not Unix"). This goal of making a free software operating system was achieved in 1992 when the last gap in the GNU system, a kernel, was filled by the third-party Linux kernel being released as Free Software, under version 2 of the GNU GPL.

Current work of the GNU Project includes software development, awareness building, political campaigning and sharing of the new material.

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Why isn't Linux embraced as the official GNU kernel?

While I knew for quite some time the existence of Hurd, and its mission as the official GNU Operating System kernel, I was wondering how come Linux is not embraced as the official GNU kernel over the years, seeing as it is in a much better state…
NlightNFotis
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Do progress reports/logging information belong on stderr or stdout?

Is there an official POSIX, GNU, or other guideline on where progress reports and logging information (things like "Doing foo; foo done") should be printed? Personally, I tend to write them to stderr so I can redirect stdout and get only the…
terdon
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What is GNU Info for?

I understand what GNU Info is and how to use it, but what is it for? Why does it exist in parallel to the man pages? Why not write detailed man pages rather than provide a separate utility?
johntait.org
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What are the differences between bsdtar and GNU tar?

I've always used GNU tar. However, all GNU/Linux distributions that I've seen ship bsdtar in their repositories. I've even seen it installed by default in some, IIRC. I know for sure that Arch GNU/Linux requires it as a part of basedevel (maybe…
strugee
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How can I achieve portability with sed -i (in-place editing)?

I'm writing shell scripts for my server, which is a shared hosting running FreeBSD. I also want to be able to test them locally, on my PC running Linux. Hence, I'm trying to write them in a portable way, but with sed I see no way to do that. Part of…
Red
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gpg —list-keys command outputs uid [ unknown ] after importing private key onto a clean install

I did a clean install of Arch Linux and imported my backed up gpg private key. As a sanity check I ran: gpg —list-keys Everything showed up as normal except for the uid which now reads: uid [ unknown ] User < [email protected] > When I first…
user223600
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When and how was the double-dash (--) introduced as an end of options delimiter in Unix/Linux?

I don't think the shell/utilities in historical Unix nor in something as "recent" as 4.4BSD supported using a double-dash(or two consecutive hyphens) as an end of options delimiter. With FreeBSD, you can see for instance a note introduced in the rm…
user44370
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Were all Unix commands re-written in Linux?

I would like to know which commands were re-written for Linux and which were retained from Unix?
Jay Harwalkar
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What is the difference between Unix, Linux, BSD and GNU?

What is the very fundamental difference between Unix, Linux, BSD and GNU? Unix was the earliest OS, so the term 'Unix like' is understandable, since they have kernel, file system structure, most of the commands, users etc are same as Unix. Still why…
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What are the main differences between BSD and GNU/Linux userland?

I've read a lot on Unix & Linux about BSDs and GNU, etc. But I still don't understand what some actual, practical differences are between BSD and GNU userlands, despite the fact that they are often mentioned. Can someone elaborate? When answering,…
strugee
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Check ping statistics without stopping

Is there a way to tell ping to show its usual termination statistics without stopping the execution? For instance, I'd like to quickly view: --- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics --- 2410 packets transmitted, 2274 received, +27 errors, 5% packet loss, time…
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What is the `[` program that resides in my system's /bin?

I was recently browsing my Fedora's /bin folder and noticed a binary named [. I did try to search the internet for more information on that, but I couldn't find anything useful. Running it through strace doesn't seem to produce anything useful for…
NlightNFotis
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sed on OSX insert at a certain line

So I've been using 'sed' on linux for a while, but have had a bit of difficulty trying to use it on OSX since 'POSIX sed' and 'GNU sed' have so many little differences. Currently I'm struggling with how to insert a line of text after a certain line…
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What's the difference between "dir" and "ls"?

I have compared the man pages of dir and ls and they seem to be exactly the same. Both are part of GNU coreutils and "list directory contents". The only difference I've seen so far is that dir doesn't colorize the output. So why do two commands…
Martin Thoma
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Subtract time using date and bash

All the other questions on the SE network deal with scenarios where either the date is assumed to be now (Q) or where only a date is specified (Q). What I want to do is supply a date and time, and then subtract a time from that. Here is what I tried…
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