Different Commands for Different Disbributions ?

[linuxnewbie]

Is it true ? Or all the commands can be transfer over? :/

[znx]

I assume you are talking about the command line. The answer in short is (almost) YES. The base of any good Linux-based distro is actually the GNU System (see gnu.org). They were along before Linux and created a system with everything but the kernel, which Linus then provided. Unfortunately there is some debate as to whether we should be calling the systems: Linux-based GNU systems or Linux systems.

 

Anyway, what all this means is that they whole of the standard shell (BASH), all the commands like base64, basename, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, cksum, comm, cp, csplit, cut, date, dd, df, dir, dircolors, dirname, du, echo, env, expand, expr, factor, false, fmt, fold, groups, head, hostid, hostname, id, install, join, kill, link, ln, logname, ls, md5sum, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, mv, nice, nl, nohup, od, paste, pathchk, pinky, pr, printenv, printf, ptx, pwd, readlink, rm, rmdir, seq, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum, sha512sum, shred, shuf, sleep, sort, split, stat, stty su, sum, sync, tac, tail, tee, test, touch, tr, true, tsort, tty, uname, unexpand, uniq, unlink, uptime, users, vdir, wc, who, whoami, yes, haha are in the coreutils package.

 

And all I have talked about there is two packages but those two literally cover the base of any shell use.

 

You might be interested to know that across Linux this is true but when you switch to BSD there is minor differences in the simplest of commands (for instance ls). Nevertheless you will still be able to work the shell and use the commands.

 

Now to the reason I said almost yes .. hehe. When you are installing/removing packages, you need to use the package management on the system. So on debian based systems its normally apt, on redhat based systems its normally rpm (and more modernly yum). So there is some differences but again these are minor and can be overcome.

 

Enjoy!

[hybrid]

What znx said... :)

 

Seriously, though, you really can transfer 99.99% of your command line knowledge from one distro to the other. The only real differences are the commands for installing software.

 

Even if you do hop over to a BSD-based system, you'll find some things that are different and seem quirky, but once you've got the basics you're well on the way!