The origin of the names of some Unix commands

Knowledge of the history of the origin of things and their names, be it a simple pencil, a car or a team of the operating system, makes their everyday use much more interesting. In this article I tried to understand the reasons for the seemingly strange names of some programs used in the Unix operating system and its relatives: * BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, etc.

A reprint of my article , written in turn, based on the page What does {some strange unix command name} stand for?

awk

Aho, Weinberger, Kerninghan
The first letters of the names of the developers of the language, employees of the Computer Lab Center for Bell Labs: Alfred Aho (head of research at this center from 1963 to 1991 and from 1997 to 2002, now is a professor at Columbia University in New York), Peter Weinberger (in 1985 his the stylized portrait became a peculiar meme of the Bell Labs research center) and Brian Kernighan (best known as co-author of one of the first books about the C language)
')

grep

Global regular expression print
According to one of the versions, the name “grep” comes from the ed command to print all the lines corresponding to a regular expression (regular expression, re): g/re/p

fgrep

Fixed grep
The fgrep command fgrep for specified fixed lines in files; A list of these lines can be read from another file. “F” means “fixed”. It is a common misconception that “f” means “fast”. This is not true: fgrep may work more slowly for egrep , but using it may be an advantage when searching for a greater number of fixed substrings than egrep can handle.

egrep

Extended grep
The egrep command uses more powerful regular expressions than grep , and is also the fastest of the grep , fgrep and egrep fgrep .

cat

Catenate
“Catenate” is a vague word meaning “join in a sequence”, that is, what the cat does with one or more files. There is no connection with the abbreviation C / A / T (Computer Aided Typesetter, computer typesetting system, a very common abbreviation in the West).

nroff, troff

new roff, typesetter new roff
The roff text formatting system is one of the central parts of any Unix system. It is thanks to her that the man documentation is prepared for display on the screen. Actually, the evolution of Unix is ​​inextricably linked with the development of this program. Its first version, called RUNOFF, was written for CTSS (the first operating system with computer time division) in the 60s by Jerome Saltzer , then was rewritten for Multics from CTSS assembler to BCPL, a little later - to PL / I. In the 70s, its capabilities were no longer met by the increased needs of users, so the functionality of the runoff program, already ported to the first Unix, was significantly expanded by Joseph Osanna, and the name was shortened to roff. After that, Brian Kernighan ported it from the PDP-11 assembler to C and in 1976 released the first version of the Troff User's Manual specification. Thus roff acquired a classic look, in many respects, remained unchanged until now.

The name “runoff” itself comes from the typographical term “run off” - “to print the circulation”.

tee

The tee command name comes from the term “tee” - a T-joint of pipes. This program copies its standard input to the specified file and to the terminal to the user, which is very similar to the flow behavior when passing through such a joint.

biff

The biff program was used in BSD systems to urgently notify the user who was working in the console about incoming mail. The author of the official version of the origin of the name is Eric Cooper :

I can tell you about the origin of the name biff, if interested. Biff was Heidi Stetner's dog when Heidi, I and Bill Joy (one of BSD's fathers and co-founder of Sun Microsystems) were students at Berkeley and early versions of BSD were still being developed. Biff was very popular among the inhabitants of Evans Hall and became famous for barking at the postman, hence the name of the team

According to information from Peter Salus’s 25 Years of UNIX, released in 1994, Biff’s dog did exist and gave its name to the program, but he didn’t bark at the postman: Heidi claimed that it was a vile slaughter. Biff was a very friendly dog ​​and he loved to chase the balls through the halls of the hostel. Together with Heidi, he attended classes and once even got an “B” grade there; his portrait hung on a notice board explaining that he was working on a dog’s thesis. Biff died in 1993 at the age of 15.

rc

runcom
The combination of “rc” used in the names of some files and directories (~ / .bashrc or /etc/rc.d) comes from the name of the RUNCOM program from the aforementioned CTSS system. This program started the programs listed in the file; and this file was also called runcom, abbreviated as “rc”.

Subsequently, many modern shells originated from RUNCOM. In particular, the shell in Plan 9 was called - rc .

bash

Bourne Again Shell
A wordplay based on the similarity of the sound of “Bourne” (surname of the author of the shell sh Stephen Born), and “born” (born). The phrase “born again” (born again, revived), in turn, also has a religious background: in many Protestant denominations, the concept of spiritual rebirth is key, and in Orthodoxy and Catholicism, the second, spiritual, birth (better known as baptism) plays not the last role. This phrase was widely heard due to various American Protestant movements and was constantly used to the place and out of place. In particular, the book was the title of one of the defendants of the Watergate scandal, Charles Colson, released in 1975.

dd

Quote from the excellent DD article : a team that is not like the others :

The dd command is almost the same as OS Unix. The last birthday is considered to be January 1, 1970, and it is known that already in 1970, the dd utility worked with tape drives, with which the data was transferred from one computer to another, and also they launched and installed Unix OS on the then popular PDP / mini-computer. eleven.

Deciphering the name of the team also applies to these long gone times. In the IBM System / 360 JCL language, there was the DD "Dataset Definition" operator (Dataset Definition), the name of which the newly created command received.

There were a lot of decoding, in particular, Disk Dump decryption (not unloading, not loading disk) is popular in runet - the version is weak, because in the described times there are no disks or dumps (whatever they understand). Much closer to the essence of the team are joking decryptions: “data destroyer” or “delete data”, which can be translated as “Get out the Disk” or “Finish the Data”, because if you use the command incorrectly, the section or output file instantly turns into junk.

vi

The shortest unambiguous abbreviation for the command to go to the visual mode ( :visual ) in the ex line editor (the command :v executes a certain command for lines that do not match the specified pattern)

vim

Vi IMproved
Superior vi.

apache

Derived from a patchy server, in the early stages of development, apache was a set of patches for NCSA HTTPd 1.3

squid

Squid FAQ :

Harris 's complaint says: "all the good are already taken." We needed to somehow separate our offspring from the Harvest program. The code name of the new development was “squid”, and so attached.

Traditional bonus for those who have read this :)

pencil

The word "pencil" is formed from the Turkic "karadas" - "slate", "graphite" (kara - "black" and das - "stone"). The first prototypes of pencils - sticks, made from a mixture of lead and zinc, appeared already in the XIV century. In the XVI century in England, graphite was discovered, the rods from which could be used as a writing tool, wrapping them in a rag; The pencil acquired a modern look (a mixture of graphite with clay in different proportions inside the wooden case) in the 18th century. The first mechanical pencils appeared already in 1869. Another important milestone in the development of the pencil industry was the idea expressed at the end of the 19th century that it is better to make pencils multifaceted in order to avoid their rolling on an inclined surface. After this pencils no longer changed their shape.