Yes you can do. use "brew install coreutils"

This is not the same thing.

Excellent, thanks!

You can't really replace the underlying tools, you'd want to install the new versions in a different folder and update your Environment to point to those executables.

EDIT: I'm wrong, didn't realize homebrew-dupes actually is meant to replace the OS X utils.

So effectively, it's only one step better than installing Cygwin on a Windows machine?

Can someone please remind me again why the MacBook is such a preffered machine for software development? For years I've been told, "You get a shell!", and "It's UNIX under the covers", etc.

Except that the shell userspace is antiquated, and the UNIX flavor is BSD rather than Linux. Meaning that I'm just as out-of-sync with my target server as if I were on a Windows machine, I still have to run Docker through a VM layer, etc.

Don't get me wrong, the hardware is excellant. But the software is even more locked-down and less customizable than the MS world... and just skipping the middle man and installing Linux directly is a 10x better developer experience than both.

I just don't get this complaint. Run brew install <package>, add a folder to PATH. Done. Anything somewhat popular (vim/git/python/ruby/graphviz, imagemagick...) is usually updated after a day and I don't remember the last time it gave me any trouble.

The comparison with Windows simply doesn't work. Unix software compiles on OS X out-of-the-box. It doesn't on Windows. The conventions (pathnames, line endings, CLIs, time zones) are either the same or compatible, on Windows they're not.

You're underestimating how helpful POSIX compliance is.

Also, OS X/macOS meets the Single Unix Spec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#Curr...

I agree with most of your grumbles.

> Can someone please remind me again why the MacBook is such a preffered machine for software development?

For me, the greatest battery life and trackpad money can buy.

100x this. I actually could not imagine going back to mouse anymore.

If your complaint is that the UNIX layer of Mac OS X isn't ~exactly~ like Linux, then the only way you're going to solve that problem is by running Linux instead.

It's easy to get more up-to-date software with package managers.

> Except that the shell userspace is antiquated, and the UNIX flavor is BSD rather than Linux.

Few people use advanced features of those utilities. As a result, these two points don't make any difference. At least for me.

> Except that the shell userspace is antiquated, and the UNIX flavor is BSD rather than Linux.

Nit: GNU. Linux doesn't have a userspace. It's a kernel.

Why not replace? If there's a security flaw, I want those versions gone.

EDIT: you edited :)

Just install all the formulae from that repository, I'd assume. They all replace some system-provided tool. I believe they install the binaries to a separate directory that you need to prepend to your $PATH in order to get your shell to default to the updated versions.