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. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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.