Solaris can learn a thing or two from Linux.

There are a few things a mature Unix like Solaris can learn from the other Unixes and slowly the good practices spread. Irix had pkill functionality over 10 years ago ... So here is my Solaris wishlist:

• Change of root's home directory to "/root" instead of "/". I like to keep my systems tidy and this practice loaned from Linux helps in doing this: your root directory ("/") does not fill up with junk and it is immediately visible what the sysadmin's "private" stuff is. If you have "/" as root's home directory it can sometimes be hard to determine if files or directories are part of the system software or not - if you have "/root" there is never any doubt.
  (Note: /usr/ucb/vipw breaks with this change - for me it does not matter but if one of your favourite tools are vipw this change is not for you).
• Add localhost.localdomain for 127.0.0.1 to /etc/inet/hosts. This way you make sure email to root on the local boxes make it with a vanilla sendmail configuration (since you always have fully qualified hostname):

      #
      # Internet host table
      #
      127.0.0.1   localhost localhost.localdomain
      10.1.1.1    odin odin.valhalla loghost
    
  

• pkill/pgrep are useful additions; but what is really annoying is that neither the standard Solaris ps -ef | grep string or pgrep string will catch string if the running process has a long argument list. You still have to use /usr/ucb/ps -axuww | grep string to catch these processes. Solaris 9 introduces pargs for printing process arguments and environment - which does not really solve the problem (since you need to already know the pid; preap for getting rid of zombies is useful though).
• Soft links (to /etc/init.d) instead of hard links for /etc/rc.?d/S and K files. I can't see any reason why these should be hard links. With hard links you risk breaking links by moving the original rc file (i.e mv /etc/init.d/sample /etc/init.d/sample.20011001) in /etc/init.d, editing a new copy (vi /etc/init.d/sample) and then on the next reboot the old rc file will still be used (since /etc/rc2.d/S50sample is hardlinked to /etc/init/sample.20011001). Another good reason for doing this is visibility - everybody can see that the rc?.d files are links to files in /etc/init.d: I see a few software vendors just putting a file in /etc/rc2.d without putting anything in /etc/init.d - having soft links instead of hard links might just open their eyes ...
• Log file cleanup. Where Solaris really could do with some cleaning up is in the log department. Logs are all over the place /var/adm, /var/log, /var/cron/log and so on. Putting everything in /var/log as Linux does would have been so much better. The Solaris practice does not exactly encourage application developers to put their logs in a sensible place either - having logs in /opt/myapp/log does not appeal to me at all. I want my /opt to be a place for applications only (i.e. pretty much a static area). The place for logging is /var unless you have some performance issue with a big /var partition. In which case /var is still the right place ;-) (but under a separate partition such as /var/log/myapp).
• grpck should work out of the box. It still breaks out of the box under Solaris 9:

  odin# grpck
  
  bin::2:root,bin,daemon
  	bin - Duplicate logname entry (gid first occurs in passwd entry)
  sys::3:root,bin,sys,adm
  	sys - Duplicate logname entry (gid first occurs in passwd entry)
  adm::4:root,adm,daemon
  	adm - Duplicate logname entry (gid first occurs in passwd entry)
  uucp::5:root,uucp
  	uucp - Duplicate logname entry (gid first occurs in passwd entry)
  lp::8:root,lp,adm
  	lp - Duplicate logname entry (gid first occurs in passwd entry)
  nuucp::9:root,nuucp
  	nuucp - Duplicate logname entry (gid first occurs in passwd entry)
  smmsp::25:smmsp
  	smmsp - Duplicate logname entry (gid first occurs in passwd entry)
  odin#