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 ------------------------------
On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 00:08 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
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 without resorting to web searches or man pages who is the first person that can name the function of each one from memory ?
There are only about 14 there that I recognise from regular use..also Ted is it my tired eyes or do you have ls in there twice ?
On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 12:51:47AM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 00:08 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
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 without resorting to web searches or man pages who is the first person that can name the function of each one from memory ?
There are only about 14 there that I recognise from regular use..also Ted is it my tired eyes or do you have ls in there twice ?
I recognise about 30, but I am a command line junkie who started using Unix somewhere about 1981 or 1982.
I have added quite a few one and two character commands of my own, I tend not to alias existing commands with shorter names though I do have make aliased to m because at one time I used to do dozens (hundreds?) of makes a day.
On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 12:51:47AM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Now without resorting to web searches or man pages who is the first person that can name the function of each one from memory ?
About 30, although I don't know how to use all 30 of them I know what they are.
There are only about 14 there that I recognise from regular use..also Ted is it my tired eyes or do you have ls in there twice ?
He also appears to have left tl in which he said he had removed :)
Thanks Adam
On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 12:51:47AM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 00:08 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
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 without resorting to web searches or man pages who is the first person that can name the function of each one from memory ?
There are only about 14 there that I recognise from regular use..also Ted is it my tired eyes or do you have ls in there twice ?
Well, it takes commands with up to four to determine this:
% cat twolettercmds.txt 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
% sed -e 's/ /\n/g' twolettercmds.txt | wc -l 55
% sed -e 's/ /\n/g' twolettercmds.txt | sort | uniq | wc -l 54
Best regards, Jan
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 ------------------------------
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Adam Bower -
Chris Green -
Ewan Leith -
Jan T. Kim -
Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk -
Wayne Stallwood