z/OS Unix is interesting, it feels kind of like the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Some things you can do from either the Unix shell interface or the 3270 interface, like compiling c/c++ programs, but a lot of things are much more difficult or impossible from the Unix shell.
In case anyone is wondering why z/OS has a Unix in it, from the wikipedia page [0]:
"Numerous core z/OS subsystems and applications rely on UNIX System Services, including the z/OS Management Facility, XML parsing and generation services, OpenSSH, the IBM HTTP Server for z/OS, the z/OS SDK for Java, and some z/OS PKI services as examples"
There is a company called Rocket Software that ports tools to z/OS Unix, including Python (2.6 and 2.7), Vim, Perl, Git, and Bash[1][2].
I think IBM actually pays them to do a lot of these ports to make Unix on z/OS suck less.
I wonder what the future for UNIX System Services will be, given the introduction of z/OS Container Extensions (zCX)?
zCX is much more WSL-like, in that it actually runs z/Linux Docker containers under z/OS, as opposed to the mere partial source-level compatibility of UNIX System Services.
(I'd love to know how zCX is actually implemented? The information IBM has released publicly so far seems rather light on technical detail.)
Some things you can do from either the Unix shell interface or the 3270 interface, like compiling c/c++ programs, but a lot of things are much more difficult or impossible from the Unix shell.
In case anyone is wondering why z/OS has a Unix in it, from the wikipedia page [0]:
"Numerous core z/OS subsystems and applications rely on UNIX System Services, including the z/OS Management Facility, XML parsing and generation services, OpenSSH, the IBM HTTP Server for z/OS, the z/OS SDK for Java, and some z/OS PKI services as examples"
There is a company called Rocket Software that ports tools to z/OS Unix, including Python (2.6 and 2.7), Vim, Perl, Git, and Bash[1][2].
I think IBM actually pays them to do a lot of these ports to make Unix on z/OS suck less.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Services
[1] https://www.rocketsoftware.com/zos-open-source/tools
[2] https://www.rocketsoftware.com/zos-open-source/languages