Re: Interpretation of extensions different from Unix/Linux?

[Keith Thompson <kst-u@mib.org>]

Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> writes:
> Keith Thompson <kst-u@mib.org> writes:
>
>> Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> writes:
>> [...]
>>> (Why is the "search" command called "grep"?  For that matter, why is the
>>> "help" command called "man"?)
>> [...]
>>
>> Why not?
>
> Because it's stupid.  ;-)
>
> Yeah, I know all the history mentioned below.
> And I'm used to it.  I still think it's stupid.
>
> Please explain to my Grandmother why it's "grep" and "man".
>
>> The original Unix text editor (or at least one of the earliest ones)
>> was "ed", a line-oriented editor.  In ed, the way to print all the
>> lines in the current buffer (file) matching a specified pattern is
>>
>> g/RE/p
>>
>> where "RE" is a regular expression.  Somebody has the bright idea of
>> extracting this functionality into a separate program.
>>
>> "man" is short for "manual".
>
> I know.
>
> And the Linux 'man' pages tell you to use 'info' if you want
> the real story.  ;-)
>
>> Unix is flexible enough that you can change all this if you like.
>
> Yeah, please explain to my Grandmother how to "change all this"
> if she likes.

There shouldn't be any need for your Grandmother to change anything.
If there's a better set of names for the basic commands ("search"
rather than "grep", and so on), it's easy enough for someone to
do all that work *once* and let everyone else, including your
Grandmother, take advantage of it.

The trend for user-friendly Unix-like systems seems to be to do
everything through a GUI environment, where the command-line tools
aren't visible at all unless you ask for them.  That's what I'd
expect someone's stereotypical Grandmother to do.  A non-programmer
user probably needs a way to avoid the command-line shell altogether,
not just a more friendly command line.  (Personally, I think GUIs
are great for running shells.)

If there were enough of a market consisting of users who (a) are
comfortable using a command line, but (b) aren't comfortable with
names like "grep" and "man", surely someone would have catered to
that market by now.  (Perhaps Midnight Commander comes close, but
I don't use it myself.)

[snip]

> But I do alias 'ls' to show all the sort-of hidden files.
> Hiding files that start with "." is just plain stupid.

So do I.  (Actually, I alias "l" to "ls -AF".)

But the idea is that there needs to be *some* mechanism for hiding
files that users normally shouldn't concern themselves with.  Unix
chose the convention of giving such files names starting with '.'.
Personally, I like to see everything that's there (and I trust myself
not to clobber anything I shouldn't).

The alternative to hiding "." files is either always to show
everything (which is likely to confuse some users), or to use a
different mechanism (maybe a metadata bit in the filesystem).  It
would be nice if the mechanism were more uniform, and distinguished
"." and ".." (which are fundamental to the structure of the file
system) vs. other dot files.

[snip]

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst-u@mib.org  <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
Nokia
"We must do something.  This is something.  Therefore, we must do this."
    -- Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, "Yes Minister"