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when developing Bash scripts, sometimes I'll run it in a Docker container, or on a VM to test it, but the ideal place for me to build out scripts is just on my local MacOS workstation.

When it comes to Bash scripts, this has never been a problem so far. However today I noticed that the date command behaves differently between Linux and MacOS.

Example scenario, adding days to a date object:

Linux: 

root@host$ date -d "$(date) 3 days" +%Y-%m-%d
2018-04-20

MacOS: 

WS:tmp user$ date -d "$(date) 3 days" +%Y-%m-%d
usage: date [-jnRu] [-d dst] [-r seconds] [-t west] [-v[+|-]val[ymwdHMS]] ...
            [-f fmt date | [[[mm]dd]HH]MM[[cc]yy][.ss]] [+format]

Doesn't work, so I have to reformat it: 

WS:tmp user$ date -j -v +3d -f "%Y-%m-%d" $(date +%Y-%m-%d) +%Y-%m-%d`
2018-04-20

What a pain! A simple bash script and now I need a container or VM just to do some simple date manipulation.

This is making me feel like I'm shooting myself in the foot developing this way, and the whole reason I got a Mac was because it's much closer to a 'nix environment than any Windows version so I could do simple local development on it.

My question(s):

  • Is this a licensing issue? It's my understanding that date is a GNU utility, so there shouldn't be any licensing issues.
  • Because I have not yet hit this issue until today, is there a known list of common apps that behave differently?
  • Is it "bad practice" to develop some bash scripts on a Mac? I've been doing it for a while now and never hit an issue until now.

Your experience with this topic is appreciated, thank you!

emmdee
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    Welcome to the wonderful world of Unix, which not only consists of Linux with a (mostly) GNU userspace but many different others like OS X, which has a BSD userspace with many subtle differences. This is an ancient problem! – Sven Apr 17 '18 at 21:34
  • You can often make the Mac CLI tools work more closely like the Linux ones you're expecting by replacing them via [Homebrew](https://brew.sh/). For example, it drives me nuts that OSX's `tail` doesn't let you do the `-f` *after* the filename, so a quick `brew install tail` fixes that. – ceejayoz Apr 17 '18 at 21:44
  • @ceejayoz Wow I never thought of that. I use brew for various things but never thought of doing it for these common apps. This is an appropriate solution! If you want to write an answer I'll accept it, thanks this helps a lot!!! – emmdee Apr 17 '18 at 22:14
  • @emmdee The question is locked, but I'm glad that helped. :-) – ceejayoz Apr 17 '18 at 22:15
  • Hi @Sven this is for work, not home/personal use and the apps written will run on servers. Hope that helps to bring it back on topic? – emmdee Apr 17 '18 at 22:16
  • If you're developing for Linux, you probably should be using a Linux workstation anyway. – Michael Hampton Apr 17 '18 at 22:28
  • @MichaelHampton Ideally yea for sure you are right. But sometimes spinning up a Vagrant box takes longer than writing a few lines of bash code so it's nice to be able to hash out some scripts on my local workstation before moving forward with it. – emmdee Apr 17 '18 at 22:36
  • I am not sure you understood me. I mean getting rid of macOS (and possibly the Mac) and working directly in Linux. – Michael Hampton Apr 17 '18 at 22:42
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    @MichaelHampton Could 2018 be the Year of the Linux Desktop? Inquiring minds want to know! – ceejayoz Apr 17 '18 at 23:06

1 Answers1

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As you have found, different OS's will have different tools installed. If your primary focus is to develop scripts for something like Debian or CentOS, then I would highly recommend you use that environment to do so. Whether it's in a VM, Cloud hosted VPS, or Docker container is up to you.

In most cases, the behavior is the same between macOS and the various Linux distros, but not always.

Alternatively, you can use tools like brew brew to install the mainline versions of tools, rather than the macOS specific ones. This obviously has other caveats as tools that overlap those on macOS are not linked by default and you would have to override them, but it's doable (it may break things, so be careful). You can also compile them on your own as well.

I'm not aware of a list of difference between Linux and macOS. It also depends on what version of Linux you want to compare it against.

Andrew
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    Thanks - I'm going to use `brew` as suggested. I already use it for other application installs. Sometimes it would take longer to spin up a Vagrant VM than to write the actual bash commands here so I would like to hash out some quick commands on my workstation. Hopefully that's understandable. – emmdee Apr 17 '18 at 22:35
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    Completely. I use `brew` to 'force install' many GNU versions of tools because they have the options I need. Also, `openssl`. Apple stopped using it so they just hardly update it anymore. You might have to manually tweak your `PATH` variable to make sure `/usr/local/bin` is reference first, then you might have to manually link certain tools using `ln -s` – Andrew Apr 17 '18 at 23:23