In a message dated: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 06:48:10 EDT
Jerry Feldman said:
>I'm not exactly sure. I've got that somewhere in my lecture notes from last
>winter, but according to Clem Cole, the only unix command that is not an
>acronym of some sort is biff, which was named after a dog.
biff was in fact named after a dog. Derek, however, was being
sarcastic with his interpretation of the meaning of awk, which really
is named after the 3 people who wrote the language; Aho, Weinberg, Kernighan.
Btw, there are many Unix commands which are not acronyms, ls comes to
mind, as does pr. If I thought long enough about this, I could
probably come up with a few more.
Here's a bit of useless Unix trivia for you. The reason there are so
many 2 letter commands is rather amusing. If you'll notice, for the
most part, the 2 letter commands each have 1 letter from the right
side of the keyboard and one from the left. Back in the late 1960s,
the only keyboards were the old teletype/DECWriter style terminals.
These things were virtually impossible to touch type on to begin
with. So, to make things easier and more efficient for themselves,
the architects of Unix created easy to remember commands they could
stab with one finger on each hand.
I don't remember where I heard/read this, but many commands seem to
fit this scheme: ls, pr, mt, od, ps, bc, mv...
And once more, a plug for some of my favorite books:
A Quarter Century of Unix, by Peter H. Salus
Casting the Net, , by Peter H. Salus
The Unix Philosophy, Mike Gancarz
These three books have more geek history in them than you'll know
what to do with :)
--
Seeya,
Paul
----
God Bless America!
...we don't need to be perfect to be the best around,
and we never stop trying to be better.
Tom Clancy, The Bear and The Dragon
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