[dagw]

And should not ever be.

Those "core standards" that you talk about didn't spring fully formed from the earth. They came about from competition and beating out and replacing the old "core standards" that lots of people argued very strongly for should not ever be replaced. When I was starting out my career I was told by experienced people that I should not learn to rely on the GNU tool features, since they're far from ubiquitous and probably won't be installed on most systems I'll be working on.

[egorfine]

That's right and still true: GNU tools are still not ubiquitous on mainstream computers. And I'm not talking about that Ultrix box still churning. For example the latest macOS carries bsd tar, so.