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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

> cat = "CATenate" > catenate is an obscure word

The word is concatenate.

dd isn't on there, but it's good: it stands for 'copy and convert'. As you can imagine 'cc' was taken.

'less' is a joke, people who remember 'more' might find it funny, but few people remember 'more' so younger folks just think it's a nonsense name.

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> The word is concatenate.

Catenate is a valid word, and synonymous with concatenate. Plus, "cat" makes a better 3 letter unix program name than "con", right?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/catenate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenation

Googling the difference (hint: none) I found this lovely ditty:

I never concatenate strings; I just catenate those little things. Of syllables few, I'm a man through and through. Shorter words? My heart joyfully sings!

David Gries

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/JavaAndDS/files/catenate.p...

Non-mobile links:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/catenate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenation

Thanks. I've edited & updated my links.

Not only that but the v7 man page actually uses the word catenate in the synopsis.

    cat - catenate and print

https://www.unix.com/man-page/v7/1/cat/

> 'less' is a joke, people who remember 'more' might find it funny, but few people remember 'more' so younger folks just think it's a nonsense name.

Carrying on the trend, there's also 'most'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_(Unix)

On some systems more is synlinked to less; so less isn't more, but more is less!

Less makes sense to me. When a command spits out too much text to fit on your screen, you pipe it to less to show you less at once.

Fair enough, but more also made sense to me because I assumed (apparently rightly) that its name refers to the "-- More --" prompt at the end of each screenful.

No. The command would be called called fewer (e.g., show me fewer lines) if that was the case.

The Danish word for “read” is “læs”, which is close to less in pronounciation, so in a way it makes sense to us.

less is more.

  less

is an improved version of

  more

Hence, the joke.

Huh. I suppose it makes less sense to the non-danes, then.

More or less.

Windows have always shipped with 'more', so there a lot more people who still remembers it than you thought.

And DOS before it. There's a reason more on Windows is named more.com (despite being a PE).

I know, but most people didn't use the command line daily post Windows 95, and many more people were born after it was released!

My thoughts exactly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenation

Concatenate is the more popular form over catenate, though it's interesting to see that it only started to leap ahead in the 60s and 70s:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Catenate%2C+co...

Crap, I thought "more" was still the default paginator. It's not, at least not in OS X.

'more' still works on OpenBSD, but funnily enough it's just 'less' in disguise.

https://man.openbsd.org/more

more is less

To continue the successor names, we've also got:

bison from yacc (yet another compiler compiler)

pine (pine is not elm) from elm (did that one stand for anything)

You missed flex from lex.

And then:

* getty; agetty ("alternative"); mingetty ("minimal"); mgetty (I always think "modem" myself); uugetty ("UUCP"); fgetty ("fast"); and ngetty (probably "Nikola")

- https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/316279/5132

* ex; vi; stevie; elvis; calvin; elwin; javi; lemmy; pvic; trived; vigor; vile; vip; virus; winvi; xvi; vim, view, evim, exim, eview, rvim, rview, gvim, gex, gview, rgvim, rgview, vimdiff, and gvimdiff (VIM); nvi; and nvim (NeoVIM)

- http://www.guckes.net/vi/clones.php3

* pax, a peace treaty in the tar versus cpio argument

elm stands for ELectronic Mail, if I'm not mistaken.

In math and physics there is the Pin group which is named because it relates to the Spin group (named after spin like of an electron) in the same way that SO (special orthogonal group) relates to O (orthogonal group) and SL (special linear group) relates to GL (general linear group). This is something some mathematicians find quite amusing.

Edit: also some say rng which is a ring without an identity (without an i). I think there are others similar to this.

https://danhalbert.org/more.html

From the Latin word "catena", meaning "chain", which is also the source for the name of the catenary curve.

Less is more. That’s the joke.

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