I think the number is relatively low because it excludes all the 2 letter shell commands from korn shell, c shell, etc
e.g.
cd - change dir bg - start a stopped (ctrl-z) process in the background fg - start a stopped (ctrl-z) process in the foreground pg - page through a file fc - view a shell history
There's also the relatively obsolete ones like cu for talking to a tty port for uucp, and the various unixes have all got their own specialities, i think hp-ux has ll which gives the same output as ls -l
i've always though telnet was a strangely long command for unix, though AIX which i normally work on has a link to telnet of tn, so I normally just do the same in linux.
i suppose though there's only so many meaningful abbreviations you can come up with, would ct be better than cat for example
Ewan
(Ted Harding) wrote:
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.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 07-Dec-05 Time: 00:08:23 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------