Why do basic Unix/Linux commands work differently in different distributions?

Question

Basic commands, like grep, use different flags in different distributions. For instance, some distributions have a version of grep that doesn't even have the -R flag, which allows for recursive searching.I have seen instances where the same functionality is offered in 2 different versions of a command, but the flags to invoke the functionality were different.

How did this come to be? Doesn't that hurt interoperability? Are there any efforts to rectify?

Answer 1

I guess it depends on the version of grep. If you're using an older version then install a later one.



@Colanth - That's not entirely true. Many distributions conform to POSIX, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX#Mostly_POSIX-compliant ) which is a family of standards for interoperability across UNIX-like systems. Such standardisation just isn't present on Windows operating systems.

Answer 2

Standards are nice - they lead to an operating system like Windows. When the OS is open source, and anyone can post his or her own version of a command, you get Linux. Since you can always use the man page for the version you have, there's no problem.

Answer 3

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Answer 4

They've found a better way to do something, which is why they changed it. :)