"Good Lord, the userland sucks." Wow - I know how you feel. In fact - looking at your specific command examples - I *so know how you feel* because I used to run into all the same problems with the same tools :) I ran into (in the brick wall sense) Solaris on and off over the course of several years and kept reacting this way. I hated it. Then I got a job using it all the time where there were people around who could give me tips and one day failed to notice that I'd become used to it.

Now that I have my usage sorted, I actually kind of like the feel that the utilities are simple and predictable in Solaris whereas the GNU utilities at times have an air of magic tricks about them and trying to do too much.

There's a bit of cultural weirdness in the Solaris world - I've found Solaris admins tend to be a pain in the ass about things like making vim available, whereas linux admins already have it installed, even within neighbouring admin groups in the same multinational banks.

Regarding your specific issues: if you have the BSD tools installed, you might find /usr/ucb/ps handy. If you don't have it.. I'm not sure how you'd install it. For date, the usage you want is 'date +%Y-%m-%d'.

For recursive grep, use find -type f -exec grep {} \; -print This would have to be the obscure one in the bunch. '-type f' means find files only, otherwise it'll grep over the files and directories and you'll get confusing duplicate results and it'll be slower. The exec thing is just a bit of magic. '{}' inserts the file it's currently iterating over, and the backslash semicolon means "this is the end of the exec block". Make sure there is a space before that backslash or gets weird about it! :) Also, the print says "print out the filename that matched". Just to be even weirder, in your display results, it does the print, after the match. So you'll see the matching lines, and then the filename they're in, which is counter-intuitive as hell until you get used to it. This find command is useful for a hell of a lot more than grep, and once you get used to it you'll probably think in a way so that you instinctively reach for find instead of grep when you need to do something like that. You can also add a parameter for name matching such as "-name '*.java'".

It might be worth moving to these command usages if you can - they all work on linux, and from memory FreeBSD has at least some of the same issues (eg: date, grep not having '-r'). It's odd - working for banks changed several habits I never would have expected. I even use vi mode in the ksh/bash command-line (set -o vi) by preference because that's what the standard was there and I had an opportunity to see how powerful it was and get used to it.

There's no way for me to give an email address here, but if I can help out with more tricks I can be contacted via my blog, http://stable.cowoh.org

Using the find which knows POSIX syntax, the following is much faster than starting up a 'grep' for each file.

/usr/5bin/find . -type f -exec grep pattern /dev/null {} +

Interesting the '-I' option to date, I didn't know about it and it is not listed in the help or manual. The source for coreutils-5.94 lists it as Deprecated.

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For all the Linux whining "me toos" out there, I've come from Solaris userland to spend my days, day, day out on GNU/Linux and it SUCKS ASS.

GNU utilities suck so bad! They're NON STANDARD, DON'T RESPECT OR ADHERE TO ANYTHING, anarchy simply rules the day.

/usr/xpg4/bin POSIX and System V userland KICK ASS. How can you stand that grep -r GARBAGE?

That is NOT how UNIX works - hence GNU stands for "GNU is not UNIX". On UNIX, we DON'T implement tools inside of other tools!

And don't even get me started on "--something" idiocy, that's just HORRIBLE.

Stupid Linux whining, meanwhile your tools are anarchistic, badly-hacked-together GNU JUNK, boy does that piss me off!