On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 12:30 PM Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, 2018-10-30 at 23:45 +0000, Rick Stevens wrote:
And remember, under that cute, glitzy desktop, OSX is simply BSD Unix. (Shhhh! Don't tell anyone! It's a secret!)
Sure, but the complete MacOS is not "simply" BSD. It's a BSD (actually XNU)-based kernel with an enormous amount of additional non-free stuff, including the whole UI system, filesystems, drivers etc., which is what makes the real difference to the end user.
macOS's base OS is Darwin, which uses a XNU kernel, which is a hybrid of a Mach microkernel and some FreeBSD and Apple/NeXT kernel code.
The basic userland, "cp" "ifconfig" "ls" "...", is from an old version of FreeBSD. And it you look at "/etc/", it's FreeBSDish, but not necessarily used.
Apple overlays its own tech, GUI and CLI, over all of this. For example, if you run "cat /etc/{master.,}passwd" you'll only find "root", "daemon", "nobody", and the macOS "service" users (like "_networkd"). The "actual" users are held in an ldap db. For example, you can change a user's shell via the "dscl" CLI tool or via the GUI system preferences advanced user options.
macOS's Unix but not *BSD.