Does Apple modify the GNU and BSD tools that comes with macOS?

Question

macOS comes with bash (which is a GNU tool), macOS also comes with tools like ls and chmod (which are BSD tools, even though I don't know from which BSD flavor they come from).

Now does the GNU and BSD tools that comes with macOS gets modified by Apple (for example: does Apple remove some features from them or add some features to them), or does Apple leave them unmodified?

Already answered at https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/506429/5132 . — JdeBP, Mar 18 '19 at 06:26

user1133275 · Answer 1 · 2019-03-19T08:58:09.213

5

Yes Apple modifies at most open tools that come with MacOS in order to support Apple specific features.

You can see this in the man pages

https://ss64.com/osx/

or if you diff the source

https://opensource.apple.com/

As a specific example compare these 3 links for ls.c;

https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/bin/ls/ls.c

https://opensource.apple.com/source/file_cmds/file_cmds-272/ls/ls.c.auto.html

https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/ls.c

edited Mar 19 '19 at 08:58

answered Mar 18 '19 at 05:04

user1133275

5,574

Do you know of an example of a tool that come with macOS that Apple modified in order to support some Apple specific feature? – user342273 Mar 19 '19 at 01:03
But ls is not listed here - – Thomas Dickey Mar 19 '19 at 08:34
@ThomasDickey you may notice from the URL that "ls" is in the file_cmds repository. – user1133275 Aug 26 '19 at 17:55

Does Apple modify the GNU and BSD tools that comes with macOS?

1 Answers1