Comment by lmm
9 years ago
> You can look for the GNU utils, you know. And you can do explicit dependancy declaration by grepping the version output to see if it's GNU or bsd, and the version number. > It's not convenient, and it could be done better, but it is by no means impossible.
In principle it may be possible, but in practice it's vaporware at best. There's no standard, established way to do this, which means there's no way that other people could maintain - the closest is probably autoconf, but I never saw anyone ship an aclocal.m4 with their shell script. Since unix utilities tend to be installed system-wide, it's not really practical to develop or test (not that the unix platform is at all test-friendly to start with) against old target versions (docker may eventually get there, but it's currently immature) - if your development machine has version 2.6 of some utility, you'll probably end up accidentally using 2.6-only features without noticing.
> Also, how do your colleagues not know AWK? In a primarily UNIX world, that's something that everybody should know. Besides, you can learn the basics in about 15 minutes.
My organization isn't primarily-unix, and people don't use awk often enough to learn it. I'm sure one could pick up the basics fairly quickly, but that's true of Spark too.
Okay, I guess.
For utilities, it's usually safe to assume that whoever is running it is running a comparable version - the most commonly used options are decades old at this point, and it's relatively unlikely you'll use the new stuff.
As for checking for GNU tooling, a grep against <tool> -v does the trick. This can also get you the version number. You can probably even write a command to do it.
It's nonstandard and suboptimal, but it is, once again, possible.
If it's theoretically possible but no-one actually does it then I call it vaporware.
That's... definitely not the right use of that term. I'd be vaporware if it's software that's promised and never appears. This works right now, it's just kind of fragile, hacky, and a PITA, so nobody does it.