In Unix, what do some obscurely named commands stand for? (2018)

[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

[dx87]

I'd heard of concatenate, but never catenate. I guess concatenate is a verb, and catenate is an adjective.

[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.

[leephillips]

And neither one is “obscure”, by a long shot.

[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!)

[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...

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

[acheron]

I always liked that dd story but it's probably not true -- it's based on the DD command in IBM JCL, which stood for "data definition".

[chills]

g/re/p lives on as :g in vim, it's kind of fun to remember its heritage to ed. There is also :v which is analogous to grep -v.

[evanb]

Computerphile did a great video with Brian Kernighan on "Where GREP Came From"

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

[dghughes]

Isn't dd "disk duplication"?

[saalweachter]

Did anyone else think it was GNU-rep, presumably a reference to an older UNIX command?

[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.

[tyingq]

I think it's common on several distributions for egrep, fgrep, zgrep, etc to all link to (or have small shell wrappers for) grep, which is gnu grep.

I would guess the various BSD distros have traditional separate greps.

[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...

[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?

[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...

[codegladiator]

The command compiles

[jeffreygoesto]

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

[0] 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/ - 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.

[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?

[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).

[Sebb767]

There is also fsck, which is named after what you say when you need to use it :)

[gorkish]

The true obscura in the history of fdisk is when it became 263044usa8

[cat199]

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