Posted on 05/29/2015 6:07:16 AM PDT by CharlesOConnell
A list of some of the more obscurely named Unix commands follows:
awkThe awk scripting language was named by its authors, Al Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. For more, see What is awk, and how do I use it?
grepThe grep command comes from the command used by the ed program (a simple and venerable Unix text editor) to print all lines matching a certain pattern:
g/re/p
For more, see What is grep, and how do I use it?
fgrep The fgrep command searches for fixed strings only, possibly taking the strings from another file. The "f" does not stand for "fast"; in fact, at times, using the fgrep command can be slower than using the egrep command. However, the fgrep command may still be useful when searching a file for a larger number of strings than the egrep command can handle.
egrep The egrep command uses fancier regular expressions than the grep command. Many people use the egrep command for its internal algorithms, which are more sophisticated than the grep and fgrep commands. Also, the egrep command is usually the fastest of the three programs.
cat "Catenate" is an obscure word meaning "to connect in a series", which is what the cat command does to one or more files. This is not to be confused with C/A/T, the Computer Aided Typesetter. For more, see In Unix, how do I combine several text files into a single file?
nroff, troff These two commands are descendants of the roff command, which was a re-implementation of the Multics runoff program. The runoff program would "run off" a good copy of a document.
teeThe tee command is named after plumbing terminology for a T-shaped pipe splitter. This Unix command splits the output of another command, sending it to a file and to the terminal.
biffThis command, which turns on asynchronous mail notification, was actually named after a dog. Courtesy of Eric Cooper, Carnegie Mellon University:
"I can confirm the origin of biff, if you're interested. Biff was Heidi Stettner's dog, back when Heidi (and I, and Bill Joy) were all grad students at U.C. Berkeley and the early versions of BSD were being developed. Biff was popular among the residents of Evans Hall, and was known for barking at the mailman, hence the name of the command."
rc.cshrc or /etc/rc) The rc command derives from the runcom facility from the MIT CTSS system, ca. 1965. From Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, as told to Vicki Brown:
"There was a facility that would execute a bunch of commands stored in a file; it was calledruncomfor "run commands", and the file began to be called "a runcom".rcin Unix is a fossil from that usage."
Note: The name of the shell from the Plan 9 operating system is also rc.
The Perl language is a text, process, and file manipulation tool, created by Larry Wall. Perl bridges the gap between shell and C programming, and is free and completely portable. The acronym is one of many variants proposed, with varying degrees of seriousness, as the true origin of the name. However, this is currently regarded as apocryphal. Spelling Perl as "PERL", as though it is an acronym, is incorrect. For further information, see the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.perl and the Perl FAQ.
For more interesting tidbits, see the book Life with Unix by Don Libes.
So UNIX was written by A ho?..........................
Abort Retry Fail was named for the sound Bill Gates dog made.
Another is dumho. It writes Hillary 10,000 times to stderr.
Unix ping
In unix a good parent, before they die, kills off all their children before they become zombies.
UNIX was reversed engineered from the operating system of the computer on the UFO that crashed an Roswell ... hence the weird command names
chown -R us ./base
;^}
Very nice!
I’ve often thought the folks who originally developed Unix were Jewish, or just had a major phobia of vowels.
Yes, but if you want, a parent can disown it's childen and they'll be orphans, but still alive.
Many years ago, when I was relatively new to unix, I was taking a class on Ultrix (Digital's version of Unix at the time). We were talking about the way timekeeping amongst machines was managed. (prior to 'ntp' being developed).
Here's how it was described in the man page....
One server is designated a master. The master is authoritative for time. Slaves will query the master for the time on a periodic basis and thus keep themselves in sync. If the master dies, or is otherwise unavailable, the slaves will hold an election amongst themselves and elect a new master. This new master will continue as authoritative until the designated master returns. If the new master dies, a new election is held.
I always thought that was an interesting way of describing it. Seemed to work pretty well.
That was an advanced administrator class. We all had our own unix workstations we were working from, with the 'teacher' having the master. server. At the beginning of the class he let us know that he fully expected someone to be able to hack into the server eventually, but he'd appreciated it if we didn't destroy it until the end of the class. After the class, all servers were restored to a 'known good' state so it didn't really matter what we did during the class.
KILL -9 .. tic tic tic
fsck - yes, it resembles the naughty word you think it does. There is a very good reason it hasn’t been changed.
It’s called “Job Security”.
See also the C language.
I always thought ‘grep’ stood for “GRab Everything Pertinent”.
PERL = Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister
LOL! post-o'-the-day!
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