2015-05-04 My historic research on cut(1) and the comparison of implementa- tions, both increased my sympathy for FreeBSD. Since long, I'd like to move more towards BSD, but GNU/Linux (especially Debian) always was simply too comfortable and good enough. My try with NetBSD, some years ago, was not as successful as it should have been. There was never a problem in the usage but I missed to go deep enough into the project to really understand it and its main project tools (package management). Unless I learn to understand these areas, I'll never be fully successful, I believe. (Man! I should have gone for that while studying! Now, the pragmatism is much too important for learning all the stuff anew ...) But back to the BSDs. The portability importance in NetBSD does not result in greater code clarity and simpler code, as I had ex- pected, but it makes the code more complex, hence I think NetBSD is no more my favorite BSD. OpenBSD would be nice, because it values clear and simple code a lot, but it mainly ignores the real world, where for instance non-English languages with multi- byte characters exist. Also, OpenBSD suffers too much from NIH, IMO. MirBSD still is an option, that solves these issues. Nonetheless, a similar arrogance exists there too. Last, we have FreeBSD. For a long time, I thought FreeBSD is to BSD what Ubuntu is to GNU/Linux. I think I was wrong. FreeBSD does care a lot about the history and also features high quality software. (Be- sides the Heirloom tools, the cut(1) implementation of FreeBSD is the only one I found, that implements POSIX fully!) Currently, I'm heavily impressed by FreeBSD and thus think that I should install it on one of my main machines to dive deep into it. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke