
In Unix, what do some obscurely named commands stand for? (2018) - frereubu
https://kb.iu.edu/d/abnd
======
FillardMillmore
Some of these seem fairly intuitive once you learn the origin - others, like
"biff", you'd never guess.

> "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."

Considering the command is used for mail notifications, it's actually quite
clever.

------
TheSoftwareGuy
> cat > Catenate

TIL the words concatenate and catenate exist, although they seem to have
almost the same exact meaning

~~~
chrisfinazzo
The dictionary defines it as "link together in a chain or series", but in
practice on many UNIX systems it's come to mean simply, 'write to stdout'
which unless you get into redirection, is just a user's terminal.

I get that the big metaphor was 'small pieces, loosely joined', but this one
has always seemed half-baked to me - e.g, it's often too small to be useful
without a bit more effort by you, the person typing things.

~~~
konjin
I'll have you know I had to use cat and tac in the way they were intended a
few days ago.

I can't remember for the life of me why, but I was shocked.

~~~
chrisfinazzo
Huzzah. You win this round.

------
jedberg
> 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."

For those who are into history, if you want to visit historic Evans hall,
where a lot of the early BSD work was done, do it quickly.

They want to tear it down soon. They are already working on plans for
replacement and it will be the highest priority building project at UC
Berkeley when new construction funding is released. Sadly, the building is
seismically unfit.

~~~
ar_lan
It's also the ugliest building known to man (and I believe the Unabomber
taught there!)

~~~
jedberg
> It's also the ugliest building known to man

It's a brutalist masterpiece, that's for sure.

> (and I believe the Unabomber taught there!)

That is a common myth that even the University pedals, but turns out it's
impossible. He taught at Cal in 1969 and the building was erected in 1971.

Turns out he actually taught in the temp buildings the math department was in
when the built the building, which have since been torn down.

------
EarthIsHome
I didn't know grep! I've seen grep used as a verb enough times that the word
"grep" just intuitively seems to describe what it does: grep things.

I was hoping dd would be listed.[0]

Edit: digging a little deeper into [0], there's a Unix Acronym List linked
[1]. There seems to be various definitions for dd. One definition says that dd
stands for copy and convert, but since cc was already taken for the C
compiler, dd was used.

[0]: [https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6804/what-does-
dd-s...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6804/what-does-dd-stand-for)

[1]:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.misc/LbLTa...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.misc/LbLTa00Jnvg)

~~~
dghughes
Isn't dd "disk duplication"?

~~~
tempodox
It's actually “convert and copy” but the command name `cc` was already
occupied by “C compiler”, so they just incremented each letter to `dd`. `dd`
can convert-and-copy any device, not just disks.

~~~
JdeBP
As can be seen at
[https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/6804/5132](https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/6804/5132)
, this wrong answer is still more popular than the right one that is supported
by Dennis Ritchie. A salutary lesson in believing things to be true because
they seem humorous or are popular.

~~~
classified
Forgive GP for not knowing which Bible to read and at whose altar to prostrate
themselves. Like every religion Unix has its goyim and infidels that need to
be flogged and flagellated so they can achieve proper enlightenment.

------
leephillips
On my Ubuntu laptop, egrep is just a script that calls grep with -E. Did egrep
absorb grep? Is the old grep still commonly installed with any distributions?

EDIT: and fgrep also is a script that calls grep, with the F argument.

~~~
pwg
The GNU tool-set merged all three into grep, and kept the fgrep and egrep
names for backwards compatibility. This is described in the man page in this
manner:

> In addition, two variant programs egrep and fgrep are available. egrep is
> the same as grep -E. fgrep is the same as grep -F. Direct invocation as
> either egrep or fgrep is deprecated, but is provided to allow historical
> applications that rely on them to run unmodified.

~~~
dfalzone
That sure sounds like GNU. Instead of building tiny tools that each do one
things, just make one big tool that can do a bunch of things depending on
which of a hundred flags you use. Not to shit on GNU; I use GNU/Linux on all
my own computers. But I notice that a lot of GNU software suffers from severe
feature creep.

------
japhyr
For anyone interested in the history of UNIX development, Brian Kernhigan's
"UNIX: A History and a Memoir" is a quick and enlightening read. I loved the
history, and I came away with a better understanding of today's cli
environment as well.

[https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-
Kernighan/d...](https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-
Kernighan/dp/1695978552/)

~~~
jandrese
I found the title a little misleading. A better title might have been "A
History of Bell Labs Center 1127".

A large chunk of the book is anecdotes about the people who worked with Mr.
Kernhigan, most of which are delightful. I highly recommend the book. There's
a huge section on how they had to hack the hell out of their new printer to
get it to work properly. Printer drivers have been crap and the hardware
cursed since the invention of printers.

------
dhruvmittal
Fascinating, never knew the biff one.

~~~
aequitas
Could it be this was the name inspiration for Mutt?

~~~
leephillips
‘As development progressed, features found in other popular clients such as
PINE and MUSH have been added, the result being a hybrid, or "mutt."’

[http://www.mutt.org/](http://www.mutt.org/)

~~~
quicklime
It’s great to have a list of what things stand for, but someone needs to make
a list of all the puns! A few more that I can think of:

more -> less

pico (pine composer) -> nano

sh (Bourne) -> bash (Bourne again)

yacc -> bison

~~~
kevinmgranger
Could vim be considered a pun? It's just vi improved, but vim itself means
"energy / enthusiasm"

~~~
jandrese
Vim used to include a line from Sherman and Sherman's song:

    
    
       The wonderful thing about tiggers
       They're loaded with vim and vigor

------
the-dude
Is YACC considered a command? Yet Another Compiler Compiler IIRC.

~~~
wahern
Sure, why not. And unlike roff/nroff/troff it actually made it into POSIX.
yacc is part of the optional C-Language Development Utilities command set:
[https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/y...](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/yacc.html)

~~~
technofiend
And it bears mentioning {n,g,t}roff is a reference to RUNOFF, a CTSS
formatting program which later made it into other operating systems at least
by name if not an actual port. [1]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF)

I always thought it was quite clever that the macro switch to roff is -m and
therefore to format man pages, you run roff -man. Publishing my resume in man
format didn't get the reaction I thought it might. Most people just asked for
it again in some other format and only one or two people only ever got the
joke that a UNIX sysadmin's resume was in -man format.

------
jeffreygoesto
Perl is "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister" [0], but don't tell anybody
;-)

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#cite_note-63](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#cite_note-63)

------
drallison
dvd as an abbreviation for Dasvidaniya, which in Russian means goodbye.
Dasvidaniya is actually two words, not one: до (until) and свида́ния (meeting
/ date). So literally it means “until the next meeting“. Dasvidaniya is a
formal way to say goodbye and should be used with people you don't know and
those older than you.(Cribbed with Google's help from learnrussianwords.com.)

dvd removed files in Unix Version 6 and earlier. If memory serves, it operated
directly on the file system data structures and was useful for recovering when
the file system got "stuck".

~~~
tenebrisalietum
Share any references if you got them.

I checked [http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/](http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/) \-
nothing shows up.

This reminded me of the `clri` command which deletes an inode by number,
reclaiming it if it is unlinked in the filesystem, if I remember correctly.

~~~
JdeBP
dcheck, icheck, and clri were in 6th Edition. You can read about them in the
Fielder and Hunter book on AT&T Unix System 5 Release 4, which describes them
as "antiques" that one should only use if one's Unix has no fsck. (-:

------
hibbelig
"cu" was before my time, I've never used it. But it's still there on my Mac.

I can never remember whether "bc" or "dc" is the program I want when I think I
might need a little calculator.

------
joezydeco
How about rn (read news (i.e. Usenet)) and then trn (threaded read news)?

------
brian_herman__
tac is cat spelled backwards it prints the contents in reverse order.

~~~
jooize
How is input to a pipe reversed?

~~~
wolfgang42
It’s written to a seekable tempfile first:
[https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/6a3d2883fed853ee...](https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/6a3d2883fed853ee01079477020091068074e12d/src/tac.c#L542-L556)

------
FerretFred
_fdisk_ \- it wouldn't be polite to expand this, but suffice to say it's
onomatopoeic if you get the syntax wrong (source: been there, done that).

~~~
cat199
iirc linux fdisk was named after the dos (cpm?) utility of the same name, and
so isn't really a unix command.

~~~
JdeBP
MS/PC-DOS 2 is when fixed disc partitioning came along.

