I love how the Unix commands have such intuitive naming.

[graemewinter@mas.to]

@xabean @jay @cstross @annehargreaves @kamstrup old enough to remember system V where you knew which part of man you wanted for system calls, library functions or command line programs

But they were also more gentle times when people were actually paid to write useful documentation and the man pages were actually helpful

[edavies@functional.cafe]

@dsw Except it's “umount” because the mental energy required to remember to leave out the “n” is less than the physical energy required to press just press the damn key, especially on an ASR33. /s

(Actually, last time I made a comment about this I was told that the reason was that very very early Unixes limited command lengths to 6 characters. There are two interpretations of the word “backward” in the phrase “backward compatibility”.)

@kamstrup

[jimfl@hachyderm.io]

@brouhaha @kamstrup On the other hand, everything burns, but paper doesn’t crash

[lallemandfabrice@mastodon.mim-libre.fr]

@kamstrup and for non-English speakers ?

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@angusm @jay @annehargreaves @kamstrup I used to write (and maintain) man pages for a living. What does that make *me*?

[astifter@mastodon.astifter.com]

@annehargreaves @kamstrup I really like the naming of the cat/tac pair.

[elephant@mastodontech.de]

@kamstrup Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_(Unix)

[a_cubed@mastodon.social]

@cstross @angusm @jay @annehargreaves @kamstrup
A survivor.
Rule 1, Charlie, Rule 1.

[groxx@hachyderm.io]

@kamstrup "man" if you need something explained at you

[bzdev@fosstodon.org]

@woe2you @marco @kamstrup Keystrokes were a bit expensive when Unix was created. Those teletypes tended to use a lot of paper (thermal paper, which came in long roles). And they were slow (I've used them).

Warning - the video shows these things, but there is a lot of typical you-tube babbling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeL3mbq1mEg

[resuna@ohai.social]

@kamstrup

DD because it's a funny reference to OS/360

AWK because the author initials

Excel because it's a excellent Visicalc

Edge because browsers are edgy

Safari because the internet is a jungle

[jay@blan.cc]

@angusm @cstross @annehargreaves @kamstrup There used to be a time when the gold standard for a man page was "You should be able to reverse engineer the program from this manpage". I recently tried to work out how to configure Thermald. Those days are long long gone.

[chrisp@cyberplace.social]

@kamstrup You have to grepulate it within the string.

[chrisp@cyberplace.social]

@renardboy @kamstrup fsck arnd && fnd out

[chrisp@cyberplace.social]

@stiiin @dsw @kamstrup POSIX compliant humour only, please, everyone.

[chrisp@cyberplace.social]

@kamstrup bash - for how you treat your keyboard.

[lightfighter@infosec.exchange]

@kamstrup Find has always frustrated me. I've found, locate(mlocate), to work much better for me.

[bricker@fosstodon.org]

@brouhaha @kamstrup
I grep OCR'd dead tree media frequently

[rnd@toot.cat]

@lallemandfabrice @kamstrup "grep" is not a word in english, it's actually an abbreviation of "g/re/p", a command in ed that (g)lobally looks for a (r)egular (e)xpression and (p)rints matching strings

but a lot of IT people actually use "grep" as a verb meaning "look through a file for mentions of a specific piece of text", like i might say "let me grep for this function", as in "let me look where this function's name is mentioned in the source code"

[hundertzwoelf@sueden.social]

@happyborg @kamstrup I know it as disk destroyer!