Asri-unix.402 net.unix-wizards utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!MBM@MIT-XX Sat Jan 2 22:13:49 1982 meow! From: Michael B McIlrath A point not brought up in all this ado over "cat" and "grep" is that there isnt a single snappy familiar English word that that succintly describes either of those programs. I think what the people who want to call "cat" "ty" (for type I gather) really want is another program that does exactly "cat $1 > /dev/tty" or some such. This was one of the complaints of the Datamation article; cat does too many weird things. (As an aside , altho cat seems to be the canonical unix program as well as canonical whipping boy for malcontents, I use it rarely; I look at files with "p" which both couldnt be shorter and reminds me of "print".) I dont know of another program that does what grep does on another system; I recently ported it to a tops-20. However, if it were renamed "search" people would probably be just as likely to confuse it with "find" as to find it an easier mnemonic. It would help if somebody bothered to explain what "grep" stands for, but I found it a fine mnemonic before I knew. Which is what I am getting at: if you are going to have a new and strange object in your world, not quite like anything you already know, it might just as well have a new and strange name, and once you have used it a few times, the funny name will refer exactly to the funny object. Why "unix" and "C"? You prefer "OS" and "APL"? Is one more meaningful than the other? --mike ------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.