Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2014 16:05:28 +0200 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: Arthur Chance <freebsd@qeng-ho.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The name "grep" Message-ID: <20140707160528.7ecf9855.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <53BA9EC0.9000201@qeng-ho.org> References: <20140707075443.d47ca06a.freebsd@edvax.de> <53BA4F77.60907@qeng-ho.org> <20140707104403.5a0694ff.freebsd@edvax.de> <53BA71A7.9040208@qeng-ho.org> <1404728392.19389.1.camel@archlinux> <53BA9EC0.9000201@qeng-ho.org>
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On Mon, 07 Jul 2014 14:21:04 +0100, Arthur Chance wrote:
> On 07/07/2014 11:19, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> > On Mon, 2014-07-07 at 11:08 +0100, Arthur Chance wrote:
> >> It's of historical interest, but 30+ years down the line
> >
> > It still matters as a mnemonic. Everybody understands that "mv" is for
> > "move". But "grep"? Most of all I like "dd", reminds me of 2001's HAL,
> > abcd ... hijklm ... yvz, it's negated by the filmmakers, but anyway ...
> > ^^ ^^ ^^ ... obviously IBM.
>
> dd is probably the Unix command I hate most (even though I use it a
> lot), [...]
The choice of dd may not sound reasonable today, but when UNIX
developed, the C compiler was _the_ essential component in order
to get things running: it was the source of anything else, and
it existed before anything else. So "copy & convert" couldn't
be named cc, and dd was usable. Today we have ee ("easy editor")
and ll (usually an alias for "ls -l" plus often other options).
> [...] just as I hated the original DD directive (and all the rest of
> JCL) back in the days when I had to use it. There were far better ways
> of doing things even then.
But not on systems that ran OS! :-)
> I've always wondered what the original writer of dd was on when he
> perpetrated that act of madness. There was Unix, with a relatively clear
> way of doing things involving -x style options and simple file names and
> then, ooh, I know what it needs, an invasive alien directive imported
> from the Big Blue universe, totally unlike anything else in the system.
> It really should have been
>
> dd [options] [ infile [ outfile ]]
>
> with the options controlling block sizes, conversions, etc.
Yes, dd is somehow an exception. A syntax like
dd [options] -i infile -o outfile
would have been imaginable, but its current style
dd [option=value] if=infile of=outfile
summarized as
dd [operands ...]
in the manpage, somehow reminds me to JCL if I think of it.
Allow me to make this clear:
//COPYME JOB (001),ROOT,CLASS=A,MSGCLASS=A,MSGLEVEL=(1,1)
//COPYPROG EXEC PGM=DD
//STUFF DD IF=SYS1.LINKLIB(VI),OF=USR.BIN(VI),
// UNIT=5065,VOL=SER=USR001,DCB=(BLKSIZE=512,RECFM=F)
//STDIN DD DUMMY
//STDOUT DD SYSOUT=*
//STDERR DD SYSOUT=*
//
Note that this is so wrong in so much more than the obvious ways. :-)
There are few other exceptions, for example programs that read
the list of files to be processed via stdin; cpio is such a program,
if I remember correctly.
--
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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