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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.

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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.

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