They famously did better than the proprietary shell tools in the original fuzzpocalypse https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~robby/courses/395-495-200... . I also think I recall reading, somewhere on jwz dot org, something which purported to be an internal SGI email giving a dismal account of the quality of the Irix tools. GNU tools often have expanded feature sets, too. But I think that GNU-tools adopters were probably also driven by a standardisation impulse to at least have the same bugs and quirks as everyone else.

Yes, here it is: “Software Usability II” by Tom Davis, the “Irix bloat memo” https://www.seriss.com/people/erco/sgi-irix-bloat-document.t... . Mind you, that bloat would probably look very modest nowadays.

▲

pram 4 days ago | parent [-]

I mean a lot of the stuff he's complaining about being crap aren’t exactly replaceable by the GNU coreutils.

People installed them on AIX/Solaris etc because the BSD/SysV tools they came with were basically abandoned. The GNU tools had a lot more useful features, not specifically more performant (although they probably were)

	▲	bombcar 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sometimes they were faster but there certainly were more “bloated” - you can find people complaining about it from the era. But they really did have tons of options and once you were used to them, you really wanted them. But remember that GNU grew up in the era of multi-user systems; and Linux was the forefront of “personal computing Unix” where the user had root.