The origin of the names of some Unix commands
Knowing the history of the origin of things and their names, whether it be a simple pencil, a car or an operating system team, makes their everyday use much more interesting. In this note, I tried to figure out the reasons for the seemingly strange name of some programs used in the Unix operating system and its relatives: * BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, etc.
Reprint of my article , written, in turn, based on the page What does {some strange unix command name} stand for?
Aho, Weinberger, Kerninghan
First letters of the names of the language developers, employees of the Bell Labs Center for Computer Research: Alfred Aho (head of research at this center from 1963 to 1991 and from 1997 to 2002, now professor at Columbia University in New York), Peter Weinberger (in 1985, his stylized portrait became a kind of meme for the Bell Labs research center) and Brian Kernigan (best known as a co-author of one of the first books about the C language)
Global regular expression print
According to one version, the name “grep” comes from the editor’s command
Fixed grep
The command
Extended grep
The command
Catenate
“Catenate,” a vague word meaning “connect in sequence,” that is, what the command
new roff, typesetter new roff roff
text formatting system is one of the central parts of any Unix system. It is thanks to her that the man documentation is being prepared for display on the screen. Actually, the evolution of Unix is inextricably linked with the development of this program. Its first version, called RUNOFF, was written for CTSS (the first operating system to share computer time) in the 60s by Jerome Saltzer, then was rewritten for Multics from CTSS assembler to BCPL, a little later - to PL / I. In the 70s, its capabilities ceased to satisfy the increased needs of users, so the functionality of the runoff program, already ported to the first Unix, was significantly expanded by Joseph Osanna, and the name was reduced to roff. After that, Brian Kernigan ported it from the PDP-11 assembler to C and in 1976 released the first version of the Troff User's Manual specification . Thus roff acquired a classic look, which has remained largely unchanged to this day.
The name “runoff” itself comes from the typographic term “run off” - “print run”.
The name of the team
The biff program was used in BSD systems to urgently alert a user who worked in the console of incoming mail. The official version of the origin of the name is Eric Cooper :
According to Peter Salus’s book “25 Years of UNIX,” published in 1994, the dog Biff really existed and gave his name to the program, but he did not bark at the postman: Heidi claimed that it was a vile slander. Biff was a very friendly dog and loved to chase balls down the hallways of the hostel. He attended classes with Heidi and once even received a B mark there; his portrait hung on a notice board explaining that he was working on a dog’s dissertation. Biff died in 1993 at the age of 15.
runcom
The combination “rc” used in the names of some files and directories (~ / .bashrc or /etc/rc.d) comes from the name of the RUNCOM program from the aforementioned CTSS system. This program ran the programs listed in the file; and such a file was also called runcom, abbreviated as “rc”.
Subsequently, many modern shells came from RUNCOM. In particular, the shell in Plan 9 was called -
Bourne Again Shell A
play on words based on the similarity of the sound of “Bourne” (surname of the author of the shell
Quote from an excellent DD article : a command that is not like the others :
The shortest unambiguous abbreviation for the command to switch to visual mode (
Vi IMproved
Superior vi.
Derived from "a patchy server" - in the early stages of development apache was a set of patches for NCSA HTTPd 1.3
Squid FAQ :
A traditional bonus for those who have read to this place :)
The word “pencil” is derived from the Turkic “karadas” - “slate”, “graphite” (kara - “black” and das - “stone”). The first prototypes of pencils - sticks made from a mixture of lead with zinc, appeared in the XIV century. In the 16th century, graphite was discovered in England, the rods of which could be used as a writing instrument, wrapping them in a rag; A modern look (a mixture of graphite and clay in different proportions inside a wooden case) acquired a pencil in the 18th century. The first mechanical pencils appeared in 1869. Another important milestone in the development of the pencil industry was the idea expressed at the end of the 19th century that pencils are best made multifaceted to avoid rolling them on an inclined surface. After that, the pencils no longer changed their shape.
Reprint of my article , written, in turn, based on the page What does {some strange unix command name} stand for?
awk
Aho, Weinberger, Kerninghan
First letters of the names of the language developers, employees of the Bell Labs Center for Computer Research: Alfred Aho (head of research at this center from 1963 to 1991 and from 1997 to 2002, now professor at Columbia University in New York), Peter Weinberger (in 1985, his stylized portrait became a kind of meme for the Bell Labs research center) and Brian Kernigan (best known as a co-author of one of the first books about the C language)
grep
Global regular expression print
According to one version, the name “grep” comes from the editor’s command
edto print all the lines matching the regular expression (regular expression, re):g/re/pfgrep
Fixed grep
The command
fgrepsearches for given fixed lines in files; a list of these lines can be read from another file. “F” means “fixed”. It is a common misconception that “f” means “fast”. This is not so: it fgrepcan work more slowly egrep, however, its use can give an advantage when searching for more fixed substrings than it egrepcan handle.egrep
Extended grep
The command
egrepuses more powerful regular expressions than grep, and is also the fastest of the three grep, fgrepand egrep.cat
Catenate
“Catenate,” a vague word meaning “connect in sequence,” that is, what the command
catdoes with one or more files. There is no connection with the abbreviation C / A / T (Computer Aided Typesetter, computer layout system, a very common abbreviation in the West).nroff, troff
new roff, typesetter new roff roff
text formatting system is one of the central parts of any Unix system. It is thanks to her that the man documentation is being prepared for display on the screen. Actually, the evolution of Unix is inextricably linked with the development of this program. Its first version, called RUNOFF, was written for CTSS (the first operating system to share computer time) in the 60s by Jerome Saltzer, then was rewritten for Multics from CTSS assembler to BCPL, a little later - to PL / I. In the 70s, its capabilities ceased to satisfy the increased needs of users, so the functionality of the runoff program, already ported to the first Unix, was significantly expanded by Joseph Osanna, and the name was reduced to roff. After that, Brian Kernigan ported it from the PDP-11 assembler to C and in 1976 released the first version of the Troff User's Manual specification . Thus roff acquired a classic look, which has remained largely unchanged to this day.
The name “runoff” itself comes from the typographic term “run off” - “print run”.
tee
The name of the team
teecomes from the term "tee" - T-pipe joint. This program copies its standard input to the specified file and to the terminal to the user, which is very similar to the behavior of the stream when passing through such a joint.biff
The biff program was used in BSD systems to urgently alert a user who worked in the console of incoming mail. The official version of the origin of the name is Eric Cooper :
I can talk about the origin of the name biff, if interested. Biff was the dog of Heidi Stetner when Heidi, me and Bill Joy (one of the BSD fathers and co-founder of Sun Microsystems) were students at Berkeley and early versions of BSD were still being developed. Biff was very popular among the inhabitants of Evans Hall and became famous for barking at the postman, hence the name of the team
According to Peter Salus’s book “25 Years of UNIX,” published in 1994, the dog Biff really existed and gave his name to the program, but he did not bark at the postman: Heidi claimed that it was a vile slander. Biff was a very friendly dog and loved to chase balls down the hallways of the hostel. He attended classes with Heidi and once even received a B mark there; his portrait hung on a notice board explaining that he was working on a dog’s dissertation. Biff died in 1993 at the age of 15.
rc
runcom
The combination “rc” used in the names of some files and directories (~ / .bashrc or /etc/rc.d) comes from the name of the RUNCOM program from the aforementioned CTSS system. This program ran the programs listed in the file; and such a file was also called runcom, abbreviated as “rc”.
Subsequently, many modern shells came from RUNCOM. In particular, the shell in Plan 9 was called -
rc.bash
Bourne Again Shell A
play on words based on the similarity of the sound of “Bourne” (surname of the author of the shell
shStephen Bourne) and “born” (born). The phrase “born again” (born again, revived), in turn, is also religiously motivated: in many Protestant denominations the concept of spiritual rebirth is the key, and in Orthodoxy and Catholicism the second, spiritual, birth (better known as baptism) plays not the last role. This phrase was heard by various American Protestant movements and was constantly used in place and out of place. In particular, this was the name of the book of one of the defendants in the Watergate scandal, Charles Coulson, released in 1975.dd
Quote from an excellent DD article : a command that is not like the others :
The dd team is almost the same age as the Unix OS. The last one is considered January 1, 1970, and it is known for certain that already in 1970 the dd utility worked with tape drives, with the help of which data was transferred from one computer to another, and they also launched and installed Unix OS on PDP /, which were then popular eleven.
The decoding of the team name also refers to these bygone times. In the IBM System / 360 JCL language, there was the DD operator, Dataset Definition, whose name was given to the newly created command.
I had to meet a lot of decryptions, in particular, Disk Dump decryption is popular in Runet (either unloading or loading the disk) - the version is weak, because in the described times there were no disks or dumps (so that they would not be understood by them). Much closer to the essence of the command are humorous decipherments: “data destroyer” or “delete data”, which can be translated as “Finish Disk” or “Finish Data”, because if the command is used incorrectly, the section or output file instantly turns into junk.
vi
The shortest unambiguous abbreviation for the command to switch to visual mode (
:visual) in the ex line editor (the command :vexecutes a certain command for lines that do not match the specified pattern)vim
Vi IMproved
Superior vi.
apache
Derived from "a patchy server" - in the early stages of development apache was a set of patches for NCSA HTTPd 1.3
squid
Squid FAQ :
Harris complaint states: "all the good ones are already taken." We needed to somehow separate our brainchild from the Harvest program. The codename of the new development was “squid”, and so attached.
A traditional bonus for those who have read to this place :)
pencil
The word “pencil” is derived from the Turkic “karadas” - “slate”, “graphite” (kara - “black” and das - “stone”). The first prototypes of pencils - sticks made from a mixture of lead with zinc, appeared in the XIV century. In the 16th century, graphite was discovered in England, the rods of which could be used as a writing instrument, wrapping them in a rag; A modern look (a mixture of graphite and clay in different proportions inside a wooden case) acquired a pencil in the 18th century. The first mechanical pencils appeared in 1869. Another important milestone in the development of the pencil industry was the idea expressed at the end of the 19th century that pencils are best made multifaceted to avoid rolling them on an inclined surface. After that, the pencils no longer changed their shape.