Installing modern commands with tasksel
Command Line – Modernizing Commands
© Lead Image © adiruch, 123RF.com
Many traditional commands now have modern replacements. With tasksel, you can install all of them in a single step.
Many basic Linux commands date back to the beginnings of Unix. In over 50 years, many have changed only in minor ways, such as supporting terabytes as a measurement of memory. Yet distributions continue to include these traditional commands by default, because they are familiar and good enough for most purposes.
In the past decade or so, replacement commands have started to appear. A few are official updates, such as Debian's apt (which tidies apt-get) or Fedora's dnf (which is meant to replace yum and its obscure code). These updates replace older software seamlessly, but many other replacement commands remain an option.
Any day now, I expect a new distribution to appear that installs some of the modern replacements by default, but I finally got tired of waiting. I devised my own simple hack to provide a thoroughly modern set of commands with the help of Debian's tasksel [1] and its beginner-friendly recipes.
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