How to determine if existing bash commands are compatible with new OS - macos

Question

I'm upgrading a mac workstation that we use for some automated data processing. In this processing we call a couple of bash scripts. The work station is currently at 10.7.x and we want to upgrade it to Mavericks.
One of the things I need to determine is if upgrading will break the bash scripts.
Most of the commands are regular /usr/bin commands:
perl
awk
sort
comm
join
uniq
sed
But one in particular is something that was intensionally installed (I thought it was installed via macports, but I don't see it in the installed list).
gjoin
Is there a good way of determining if these commands change in any substantial way between versions before I actually upgrade the workstation?

Answer 1

None of those are "/usr/bin commands". They are binaries that exist on the system. They have nothing to do with your shell, as such.
Most, if not all, of those commands will report their version should you ask them (with --version or similar).
To determine whether things might possibly break you get to find out what has changed between the versions in question and to know whether that matters you need to know what the scripts that call them do and what functionality, from those binaries/languages, they use. That being said I think it very unlikely that updates to those commands will cause your scripts trouble unless your scripts depend on broken behaviour in the given tool or depend on explicit error (or other) messages from the tools for their operation.
Edit: As Pumbaa80 points out in his comment on the OP the only real way to know for sure whether the scripts will work or not is to try them and see. Though obviously testing of non-trivial scripts is certainly complicated and can be very difficult (if not all-but practically impossible depending on the task and script).

Answer 2

By the way...
Amongst the binaries/commands you list, Perl is the odd one out because that typically cannot be considered to have a single version, since it can have a load of additional installed modules which themselves can all be different versions. You may find it useful to run the following on your existing OSX 10.7 to find which modules are installed there so you can grab and install the same ones on Mavericks.
perl -MExtUtils::Installed -MData::Dumper -e '$inst=ExtUtils::Installed->new();print Dumper($inst->modules());'
For example, mine gives this:
$VAR1 = 'Bundle::NetSNMP';
$VAR2 = 'CPAN';
$VAR3 = 'Color::Similarity';
$VAR4 = 'Crypt::RC4';
$VAR5 = 'Devel::NYTProf';
$VAR6 = 'Digest::Perl::MD5';
$VAR7 = 'File::HomeDir';
$VAR8 = 'Graphics::ColorNames';
$VAR9 = 'Graphics::ColorObject';
$VAR10 = 'Image::Magick';
$VAR11 = 'JSON';
$VAR12 = 'JSON::Any';
$VAR13 = 'Mac::SystemDirectory';
$VAR14 = 'Mozilla::CA';
$VAR15 = 'OLE::Storage_Lite';
$VAR16 = 'Perl';
$VAR17 = 'Spreadsheet::ParseExcel';
$VAR18 = 'Spreadsheet::XLSX';
$VAR19 = 'Test::Without::Module';
$VAR20 = 'mod_perl2';