TRADEOFFS

Using bsdutils in place of GNU coreutils does come with some tradeoffs.  The
list below highlights some of these that you should consider before making the
switch:


Some commands do not exist
--------------------------

The following commands are specific to GNU coreutils and are not part of a BSD
base system but have alternatives:

    COMMAND    DESCRIPTION                    ALTERNATIVE
    dir        list directory contents        ls
    dircolors  color setup for ls             N/A - color ls not supported
    vdir       vertical 'dir' command         ls
    hostid     print numeric host identifier  none - dropped in 4.4BSD

The following commands are specific to GNU coreutils and have no alternative
provided by a BSD system:

    COMMAND    DESCRIPTION
    od         dump files in octal and other formats
    nproc      print number of processing units available
    pinky      lightweight finger

Some of these commands can be implemented with simple scripts.  The ones we
have done that for are available in the scripts/ subdirectory.  Note that these
deviate from the standard BSD offering, but are an attempt to bridge the
BSD-GNU command set gap.


Lack of long options
--------------------

This is a usability thing, but if you have a lot of scripts that use the long
options for GNU coreutils commands, you will have to change those to short
options with bsdutils.


No support for SELinux
----------------------

The ls(1) command from GNU coreutils can display SELinux information in file
listings.  Since this is Linux-specific, the bsdutils do not have support for
it.  If you don't need this or don't care about SELinux, then the bsdutils
should be functionally equivalent for you.

We are open to extending these utilities with SELinux functionality if enough
people want it.


No translations
---------------

The bsdutils commands come with very simple untranslated help output and an
English language man page.  There may be translated man pages in the OpenBSD
source tree (we should look for those), but the commands themselves don't
output text in other languages.  However, text manipulation commands and things
like ls(1) do work with UTF-8 encodings and wide characters.