Erik Christiansen said,

On Debian 7.8.0 it's there without overt action on my part, so bsdmainutils is either a default install, or was pulled in by some of all the other stuff I have to download after every distro change. (It's always been there on SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, Redhat, Ubuntu, and Debian, when I've needed it.)

In debian testing bsdmainutils is depended on by man-db, lsb-core, xorg and x11-apps so its pulled in ___very___ early in the piece, so its very likely on all linux systems. Linux since kernel 0.96d, when the entire linux distro ___plus____ source fitted on a single CD, Lindsay