as someone who worked in an hpux and solaris (and a little AIX) shop, writing code with a fair number of system calls on these systems, brings back memories and not good ones.
Subtle differences in the way everything was done. slight difference like: the max size of a udp packet was slightly smaller on hpux (or was it solaris) such that things would break in unexpected ways. The gzip or tar params where all slightly off... You got used to it but it was a pain.
This reminds me why linux was ascendant. I'm not sure its better but much more consistent.
More consistent perhaps - though tremendously inconsistent between distributions, and versions of a given distribution, in an absolute sense...
I read somewhere that Bill Gates said in the 80s that Unix has a versions/forks problem which will remain with it forever. If that is true then it's one bloody successful prediction.
Given that things are inconsistent across distributions, that's basically the same as being inconsistent between Solaris and AIX.
One inconsistency I've been very annoyed by over the years is the differences in ps. I ended up making a .cshrc that contained aliases to work around them. I'd check which OS I was using and alias a command to call ps with the arguments I used regularly. I used to work often on Irix, Solaris, and Linux and it was a pain to remember which arguments I needed. This was especially true on ssh connections where I didn't always remember which OS a particular machine ran.
Subtle differences in the way everything was done. slight difference like: the max size of a udp packet was slightly smaller on hpux (or was it solaris) such that things would break in unexpected ways. The gzip or tar params where all slightly off... You got used to it but it was a pain.
This reminds me why linux was ascendant. I'm not sure its better but much more consistent.