Use this tag for questions about where command names come from. For example, "what does the f in fbar stand for?"
Questions tagged [command-names]
6 questions
51
votes
5 answers
What does dd stand for?
I know very well what the command does, but man dd, info dd tell me: 'Convert and copy a file', as does GNU Coreutils.
Google says its an abbreviation of everything between medicine and bad webchat slang; except someone saying it means 'data…
invert
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38
votes
1 answer
Why does Plan 9 use "snarf" instead of "copy"?
When you watch presentations about Plan 9 and its acme editor you might notice that the name for copy is snarf (I wasn't able to find any meaningful explanation unfortunately).
Why is it so?
Is there a reason for that? Was it done to create a…
Mateusz Piotrowski
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11
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1 answer
What does the "f" in fdisk stand for?
gdisk stands for GPT fdisk. cfdisk stands for curses fdisk. And so on and so forth.
However, what does the original "f" in fdisk stand for? The only things I can think of would be either "files" or "floppy", but neither of these make a ton of sense.
strugee
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2 answers
What, if any, naming convention was used for the standard Unix commands?
I was trying to find the naming convention for Linux commands.
For commands like cp, rm, mv, etc it seems to be based on first and second last character like
move is mv
list is ls
copy is cp
change directory is cd, the first character of two…
Adiii
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3
votes
1 answer
Which 2-letter POSIX command is different from all the others?
I was interviewed for an internship and I got the same question as this one: http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Which-2-letter-POSIX-command-is-different-from-all-the-others-QTN_498236.htm
The answer is right, it is cd (as the interviewer told me…
Boyu Fang
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How to sort command name + arguments output of ps in solaris
Below is my sample output of ps command in solaris
myuser 26856 0.0 0.1 1716368 118576 ? S Feb 18 2:17 /web/bea/platform1221/jdk1.8.0_221/bin/java -Djava.security.manager…
Ashar
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