Is there a way for a cross-platform developer who's not using macOS themselves to see which command line programs are included in a stock macOS install (without Xcode command line tools), by OS version?
Even for a Mac developer, is there any way other than collecting everything executable in /usr/bin on a fresh install?
I’m not aware of any definitive index of command-line tools installed by OS version [1].
Having said that, this rarely comes up because we discourage folks from using a command-line tool as an API. Rather, we recommend that they call the API that underlies the tool. Of course, there are some tasks that don’t have a matching API )-:
Why is this important to you?
Finally, you wrote:
is there any way other than collecting everything executable in
/usr/binon a fresh install?
That won’t work for a couple of reasons. The obvious one is that command-line tools can be installed in locations other than /usr/bin. The less obvious one is that many command-line tools are trampolines for tools that embedded inside Xcode. For example, /usr/bin/nm is present on a customer release of macOS 12 but is just a trampoline that prompts you to install the developer tools:
% nm
xcode-select: note: no developer tools were found at '/Applications/Xcode.app', requesting install. Choose an option in the dialog to download the command line developer tools.
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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"
[1] If I need to know whether a specific tool is available on a specific OS release, I spin up my VM for that release.