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Comment by malux85 | Hacker News Reader

Please, I hope this is a thing. If not, I'll code the implementation.

Looks like it ought to still be a thing:

http://h30266.www3.hpe.com/odl/vax/opsys/vmsos73/vmsos73/648...

> "You can abbreviate a command as long as the abbreviated name remains unique among the defined commands on a system. DCL looks only at the first four characters for uniqueness."

and since max command line length seems to be a few K, the masochistic could try instead:

    $ DISCIPLINEOFPROGRAMMING

(are there any other 1976 things in the equivalence set of DISCONNECT?)

What is this thing? What is this for?

DCL is VMS's command line interface. Commands start with full-on verbs (set, copy, define, print, ...). You can use partial strings in commands as long as they are unique (e.g. "set def" instead of "set default"). Imagine being able to type "pyth" at a bash prompt and it running python.

What I think the previous posts are referring to (and which I don't remember from my DCL days) is that apparently DCL only checks the first four characters for uniqueness, so "disc", "discoduck" and "discgolf" match the "disconnect" command.

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