Comment by qwertyuiop924
9 years ago
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.