Marc Abramowitz » Porting Command Line UNIX Tools to Mac OS X

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12/19/2005

Porting Command Line UNIX Tools to Mac OS X

December 19th 2005 Posted to Computers, Mac, Programming, UNIX

This article is an interesting discussion of how Mac OS X differs from other Unices and what some of the considerations are when porting Unix software to Mac OS X.

Some snippets of interest:

dlopen, dlsym, dlclose, etc. not supported; there are some ugly Mac-specific alternatives. I thought I had heard that Mac had implementations of those functions written in terms of the Mac-specific ones. I don’t know if that was wrong or maybe this document is old.
Mac OS X has a different mechanism for shared libraries and a different linker
No ldd; use otool -L instead.

Porting Command Line UNIX Tools to Mac OS X

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