GNU

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From Wikipedia:

GNU is an operating system and an extensive collection of computer software. GNU is composed wholly of free software, most of which is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL). GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix!".

Because the GNU kernel, Hurd, is not production-ready [1], GNU is usually used with the Linux kernel. Arch Linux is such a GNU/Linux distribution, using GNU software like the Bash shell, the GNU coreutils, the GNU toolchain and numerous other utilities and libraries. This page does not attempt to list all of the nearly 400 GNU packages and only highlights some.

Texinfo

GNU software is documented using the Texinfo typesetting syntax. You can view Info documents using the info program, provided by the texinfo package.

While most GNU software also provides man pages, the Info documents tend to be more comprehensive. To view an Info document, simply enter: 

$ info page_name

Base system

  • GRUB — GRUB is the bootloader from the GNU project.
https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ || grub
  • Bash — It is an sh-compatible shell that incorporates useful features from the Korn shell (ksh) and C shell (csh).
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/ || bash
  • Coreutils — Coreutils provides the basic file, shell and text manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system.
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/ || coreutils
  • gzip — gzip is both a file format and a software application for compression and decompression.
https://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/ || gzip
  • tar — It provides the ability to create or decompress tar archives, as well as various other kinds of manipulation.
https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/ || tar

Toolchain

Most tools of the GNU toolchain are in the base-devel group, except glibc (required by base) and GDB.

  • GNU make — GNU make utility to maintain groups of programs.
https://www.gnu.org/software/make || make
  • GCC — The GNU Compiler Collection - C and C++ frontends.
https://gcc.gnu.org/ || gcc
  • glibc — GNU's implementation of the C library.
https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/ || glibc (required by base)
  • GNU Binutils — A set of programs to assemble and manipulate binary and object files. Includes ld.
https://www.gnu.org/software/binutils/ || binutils
  • GNU Bison — The GNU general-purpose parser generator.
https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/bison.html || bison
  • GNU m4 — The GNU macro processor.
https://www.gnu.org/software/m4/ || m4
  • GDB — The GNU Debugger.
https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/ || gdb

Build system

From Wikipedia:

The GNU Build System, also known as the Autotools, is a suite of programming tools designed to assist in making source code packages portable to many Unix-like systems.
  • GNU Autoconf — Tool for automatically configuring source code.
https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf || autoconf
  • GNU Automake — Tool for automatically creating Makefiles.
https://www.gnu.org/software/automake || automake
https://www.gnu.org/software/libtool || libtool

Other software

Many other optional GNU tools are available in the official repositories:

  • GNOME, a desktop environment
  • GIMP, an image editor
  • GTK, a widget toolkit
  • Gnumeric, a spreadsheet software
  • GNU Parted, a partition manager
  • GNU Screen, a terminal multiplexer
  • GNU nano, a command-line text editor
  • GNU Emacs, an extensible, customizable, self-documenting text editor
  • GnuPG, an OpenPGP implementation
  • GNU Octave, a scientific programming language
  • GNU Readline, a line-editing library for command-line interfaces

See also