Acbosgd.1332
net.unix-wizards
utzoo!decvax!duke!chico!zeppo!harpo!cbosg!cbosgd!mark
Wed Jan 6 10:21:12 1982
Re: Reply to: On
In case anyone cares, "grep" does not stand for "Global Regular Expression
Pattern", it stands for the ed command
g/r.e./p
Admittedly pretty obscure, but we've defined a new word, folks!
As to the UNIX command names, yes, they are unfortunate, but they are
both firmly established and short (=easy to type). Making a link might
help briefly, but then your users learn to use "ty" instead of "cat",
and while they think they know UNIX, they go to the next system and it
doesn't work. I don't like the Bourne Shell syntax either, but I can
sure see the advantages of having one undisputable standard (having both
sh and csh around causes LOTS of confusion.)
However, the ln solution misses one of the points I've heard people make.
They say "10 systems let me type any unambiguous abbreviation for my
command, thus 'ty', 'typ', or 'type' all work". Creating links for all
the abbrs is kind of overkill. Given the directory/path structure of
modern UNIX, I don't see any reasonable way to do this abbreviation stuff
in the shell. But rumor has it that Stanford has a csh hacked up to do
TENEX EXEC style command completion/abbreviation. It would be real interesting
to see how they did it.
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