option to favor GNU tools instead of SunOS binaries?

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

On my school's SunOS there are a lot of tools that
sound the same but aren't exactly the same as the GNU
tools that I'm accustomed with from Debian. This is
confusing and error-prone.

For example

    du

isn't GNU du(1) but a binary on the SunOS system:

    /usr/bin/du

and there is also

    /usr/ucb/du

However, GNU du *is* installed, in

    /it/sw/gnutools/bin/du

And this is the same for so many tools: ls, grep, ...

So the question is: how can I make the GNU toolchain
the favored alternative when there are several
executables? Without setting aliases one by one... (I
use zsh.)

Also, I don't want to remove /usr/bin from PATH as
there are stuff there that isn't in the GNU path, e.g.
troff. I don't say I prefer troff to groff, but why
not keep everything?

The SunOS is:

    SunOS ... 5.10 Generic_150400-19 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V240

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