Etymology of linux commands [closed]

Answer 1

Kind of a joke answer, but citing from http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/requium.html:

I have only been able to come up with one algorithm for creating Unix command names: think of a good English word to describe what you want to do, then think of an obscure near- or partial-synonym, throw away all the vowels, arbitrarily shorten what's left, and then, finally, as a sop to the literate programmer, maybe reinsert one of the missing vowels.

Answer 2

The "more" utility was named because of the prompt after each page. The "less" utility is another pager app, so named because "less is more."

Mailers have a long history of funky names. Elm was "electronic mail." Pine is an acronym "pine is no longer elm." Balsa is meant to be light weight.

Not Linux, but the Mac OS X tool to glue multiple single-architecture binaries into a single multi-architecture binary (aka a "fat" binary) is called "lipo".

Answer 3

awk is named after the initials of its authors: Alfred V. Aho, Peter J. Weinberger and Brian W. Kernighan.

Answer 4

The VMS style longwinded 'option=mode' commands to 'dd' were put in because somebody complained about the short cryptic options on unix commands.

Answer 5

The Unix biff cmd (announce arrival of emails) was named after someone's dog who barked whenever the mailman arrived. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biff

Many other such interesting tidbits from the early days of computing can be found in The Jargon File. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File

Answer 6

Let's not forget the "is not" recursive naming scheme:

• pine = Pine Is not Elm (although one of the original authors denies this and it now officially stands for "Pine Internet News and E-mail")

• wine = Wine Is not an Emulator

and of course:

• GNU = GNU is Not Unix (although not a command per se)