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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