Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Or user-friendly for that matter. I think it's pointless to keep using utilities with titles like man, cp, ls, fsck, grep etc., which are are extremely unintuitive to most people. We're not using 300 bps dumb terminals any more, but the Unix command line remains about as friendly as a leopard. I hated this ~20 years ago when I first learned Linux, but it was the price I had to pay to set up my own domain and hey, a free Unix clone. But two decades later, it's still pretty unfriendly, and a there's still a lot of command-line snobbery that seems dedicated to preserving this unintentional but obsolete obscurantism, like thoroughbred horse breeders who refuse to acknowledge the market's preference for cars and bicycles.

View on HN

Not-so-compelling examples of Unix command line idioms that are needlessly baroque: cp, man, ls, grep.

Great examples of Unix command line idioms that are needlessly baroque: find, ifconfig, route, netstat, lsof.

I agree with you about find, but I was thinking of the utility itself rather than the command-line usage. 'find' is at least descriptive of what the command does. 'cp' is somewhat like 'copy' but 'man' should be called 'help', 'ls' should be called 'list' and 'grep' would be more obvious with any name, except maybe 'brian.'

The 'unfriendliness' doesn't come from the names, it's that for it to make sense you have to absorb some conceptual framework of how the thing works. People adapt to odd names quite easily, just as you have, once they get used to them - both syntactically (ls doesn't actually stand for 'list') and semantically (find doesn't really find, maybe 'ftraverse' for filtered traverse).

To use the unix command line you have to get your head around a bunch of key concepts, say, globbing, i/o redirection, pipes, etc. After that, whether it's 'grep' or 'brian' isn't going to get in your way much.

This sort of jargon is pretty typical, though, and I think it's a fairly small barrier. Want to learn some LISPy language? Here come the entirely meaningless car, cdr, cons, s-expression. Functional processing of sequences? Well you can map, you can reduce, you can zip, you can fold. Building your first RoR app? Don't forget to railtie your merb to the phusion gem of the sinatra rack, but not before you've raked your capistrano with a cucumber. You can probably safely rename every JS framework to an MMM (Marklar, Marklar, Marklar) framework given the liberties they take with the meaning of the things M, V and C stand for.

You can give, say, 'cat' or 'tee' magically and perfectly clear names but than in itself won't make anyone understand things like 'unix utilities have one input and two output streams' any better.

I actually love grep. I'm not sure why, but it's taken such a hold in my brain that I intuitively associate searching for something specific with the word "grep."

I agree with man. It makes sense technically because of "manual"...except that "man" is its own word. Every time I type man, I feel like I'm typing the gender, and it's weird.

cp bothers me because they shortened a four-letter word, the same with ls and list. Despite the original terminal constraints, they couldn't spare two characters?

> cp bothers me because they shortened a four-letter word, the same with ls and list. Despite the original terminal constraints, they couldn't spare two characters?

Really, I think that with an OS designed in the late 1960s, brutally reducing commonly-used commands to the shortest recognizable form was a very good idea.

Storage capacity (both RAM and persistent), processor speeds, and bandwidth for internal and network transfers were all many orders of magnitude less than today's systems. Extra bytes had a real cost.

I get to self-pedantipoint myself here, 'ls' does not stand for the Multics 'list segments' as I thought, it didn't mean 'list segments' in Multics either, that's just folk etymology that's made it into Wikipedia (I just took it out).

http://alt.folklore.computers.narkive.com/7q9reknM/1950s-at-...

Author of that post is Tom Van Vleck, who ought to know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Van_Vleck

I believe we're talking about kernel development here, not GNU utilities. However, what naming scheme would you prefer? The command line is fairly unintuitive as it is. I would argue it is preferable to have short, memorable and fast to type names.

It is about kernel development, but I think this small issue I've pointed to is symptomatic of the general problem.

These names are short, but not memorable or easily discoverable.

To be fair, it's entirely possible to create aliases with more intuitive names and dump a "you can type ____ for short" message on each run.

Which leads me to suspect that if there were a demand for "a big file to source in your bashrc to alias 'cp' to 'copy'", it would exist. It is not exactly a difficult thing to do, but nobody actually cares enough to do it (probably because it is not actually a problem).

I suspect people get used to cp, mv, etc, and then aren't interested in longer versions anymore. I'd still say it'd be a good default.

I agree with this. A lot of the limitations of 1980s unix no longer exist, yet we still constrain our terminals to obtuse nomenclature and bad syntax like we only have 80 characters before the terminal auto-returns.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com