Branches of UNIX

Shell Commands TCP/IP X Windows Admin. Admin. Commands Security

Families or "Flavors" of UNIX

UNIX development split into two main branches in the 1980s, and for a couple of decades, most distributions of UNIX were based on one of two versions that had been developed in that period. More recently, LINUX has gained popularity on smaller microprocessor systems, resulting in three main families or "flavors" of UNIX:

System V, originally developed by AT&T, used primarily on larger systems, and
BSD , the Berkeley Software Distribution, used primarily on desktops and smaller servers
LINUX , used primarily on desktops and smaller servers

Versions of UNIX from one branch will be similar to different versions from the same branch, but will be significantly different from UNIX versions from the other branch.

You might be able to determine the family that any particular UNIX system belongs to by entering various ps commands which display currently running processes:


         ps -Af
         

         ps -xum
         

         ps -efH

	System V-based	BSD -based	LINUX
Display all processes	`ps -Af`	`ps -xum`	`ps -efH`
Examples	Sun Solaris, IBM AIX	Apple Max OS X, SunOS, FreeBSD	LINUX

Last updated Thursday October 19, 2006

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