Differences between OS X and Linux

Jeewhizz said:

But what difference is there between linux and OS X... I hear that you can't su - directly to root (which sucks 🙁 )

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Actually you can su to root, but you have to enable root login first. But this is completely unnecessary, as you can use the sudo tool to do anything you want as root (even create a root shell with sudo -s, just like su).

There are probably a large number of tiny differences, but as someone who hasn't used Linux (which I suspect of most people on this site too) it may be easier if you point out things important to you and then people can respond to how they might be different (or not) on OS X.

Jeewhizz said:

I'm fairly into linux - i run 4 servers and spend my life at the command prompt...

But what difference is there between linux and OS X... I hear that you can't su - directly to root (which sucks 🙁 ) and in the other thread, eth0 is now en0

but what else is different - thanks for the pointers in advance - will save some head banging 😉

Jee

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RTFMP (Read the f**king man pages)

MisterMe said:

RTFMP (Read the f**king man pages)

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😱 Someone said a worty dird. 🙂 Besides, the man pages would be so similar that it may not even help.

Anyway, since OS X is based on BSD, differences between OpenBSD and Linux would apply.

I wish they could nail down interface names. How many more do we need?

Jeewhizz said:

I'm fairly into linux - i run 4 servers and spend my life at the command prompt...

But what difference is there between linux and OS X... I hear that you can't su - directly to root (which sucks 🙁 ) and in the other thread, eth0 is now en0

but what else is different - thanks for the pointers in advance - will save some head banging 😉

Jee

Click to expand...

Dont know much about linux, but 'su' is replaced by 'sudo' and yah..eth0,eth1 by en0, en1...
and the rest, for my purposes, is pretty much the same..

/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb
http://fink.sourceforge.net/

A slight correction - "su" and "sudo" are both present in Linux; they are actually slightly different commands. "sudo" in OS X is the same program as "sudo" in Linux or BSD or ...

For the most part the only differences I've seen at the user level between Linux and OS X are the same ones that exist between Linux and BSD. The admin stuff is significantly different, though - it all appears to have come from NeXT's legacy. Usually you make admin-level changes in the netinfo database, for example, and they get pushed to places like /etc/group and such. I have noticed the locations of many files are becoming more standardized with standard *nix - for example, in Panther the Kerberos config file is /etc/krb5.conf (whereas in previous versions it was in some odd place under /Library, I think, that I had to look up every bloody time...).