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How To Guides for UNIX Summary UNIX Families

"How To" Guides for UNIX

Branches of UNIX UNIX

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:

  1. System V, originally developed by AT&T, used primarily on larger systems, and
  2. BSD, the Berkeley Software Distribution, used primarily on desktops and smaller servers
  3. 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
Thursday October 19, 2006
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