What is the difference between Linux and UNIX operating systems?

Question

How a background process is treated by operating system ?

Answer 1

Linux is clone of Unix .

Linux is just a kernel. All Linux distributions includes GUI system + GNU utilities (such as cp, mv, ls,date, bash etc) + installation & management tools + GNU c/c++ Compilers + Editors (vi) + and various applications (such as OpenOffice, Firefox). However, most UNIX operating systems are considered as a complete operating system as everything come from a single source or vendor.

Linux by default supports and use ext3 or ext4 file systems.
UNIX comes with various file systems such as jfs, gpfs (AIX), jfs, gpfs (HP-UX), jfs, gpfs (Solaris).

Comments

Not quite true, not all distributions will include a GUI system.  Arch Linux, for example, does not come with a GUI, or really much of anything other than the bare essentials (Linux kernel, GNU coreutils, etc)

Answer 2

Linux is an operating system kernel, and UNIX is a certification for operating systems.

The UNIX standard evolved from the original Unix system developed at Bell Labs. After Unix System V, it ceased to be developed as a single operating system, and was instead developed by various competing companies, such as Solaris (from Sun Microsystems), AIX (from IBM), HP-UX (from Hewlett-Packard), and IRIX (from Silicon Graphics). UNIX is a specification for baseline interoperability between these systems, even though there are many major architectural differences between them.

Linux has never been certified as being a version of UNIX, so it is described as being "Unix-like." A comprehensive list of differences between Linux and "UNIX" isn't possible, because there are several completely different "UNIX" systems.

Credit: WikiAnswers

Answer 3

Unix is owned by the Big Companies i.e. IBM AIX, Sun Solaris (Now oracle) and HP-UX where as Linux is opensource and free. However people treat them as synonyms but they are not though look, feel and usage wise mostly same with one difference is Unix is not suitable to small system where as Linux is suitable to small and big both.

Answer 4

For any practical purpose any modern Linux distribution (Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat etc etc) is a Unix OS, but technically no system can claim to be Unix without being certified, so at best we can say Linux is Unix-like OS. This also applies to BSD systems.

Note: Mac OS X is certified Unix (based on BSD).