Hi Folks,
The early Unix developers were parsimonious with
keystrokes (and for good reason), so gave many
commands very short names (like 'ls', 'mv').
So I thought I'd do a quick hunt for all 1- or
2-letter commands names on a Red Hat 9 system.
Out of the 26 + 26*26 = 702 possible command names
that could be made from 1 or 2 lower-case letters,
I found only 55 (8%) in root's PATH:
w
ab ar as at bc cc ci co cp dc dd df dp
du ed ex gs gv id ip jw ld ls ln lp ls
lz mf mt mv nl nm od pb pm pr ps rb rm
rx rz sb sg sh su sx sz tc tl tr ul uz
vi wc
Now that IS parsimonious! (I've added one or two
of my own, like 'tl' for 'telnet', but have left
these out of the above).
Hmmm,
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 07-Dec-05 Time: 00:08:23
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