Re: Interpretation of extensions different from Unix/Linux?

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

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?

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".

Unix is flexible enough that you can change all this if you like.
The shell is just another program.  It would be easy enough to
create a new shell, or even a set of aliases for an existing shell,
that remaps all the command names to something more "sensible", so
"man" is called "help" and "grep" is called "search".

I find it interesting that nobody bothers to do this.  Once you
get used to the odd names, they're really not a problem.

You also mentioned that the arguments grep are "backwards".
It's true that the argument order is imposed by wildcard expansion,
but what's backwards about putting the search terms first and
file name(s) last?  I think it's just a matter of what you're
accustomed to.

The Ada-relevant point, I suppose, is that Unix behavior is just
as valid as, say, VMS behavior -- or at least Ada needs to treat it
that way.  If Ada is going to provide functionality for things that
differ from one OS to another, it needs to accomodate different
systems, even the subset that I think is stupid, as well as the
differing subset that you think is stupid.

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst-u@mib.org  <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
Nokia
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