6 ms·
Still oddly named. Why isn't it called count or cnt?
by AstralStorm 8y ago
Still oddly named. Why isn't it called count or cnt?
- saagarjha 8y agoTo keep with the Unix tradition of short command names, I guess?
- LukeShu 8y ago`wc` was in 1st edition Unix. It was setting the tradition, not keeping with it!
- rotten 8y agoI suspect the ability to count things other than words was added later.
- Ensorceled 8y agowc shares an environment with grep, awk, sed and vi; wc is NOT oddly named.
- tpm 8y agoalso with at, bc, cd, cp, dd, df, du and so on
- pgl 8y agoI'm not sure about that - I think you could argue that they're all oddly named.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoFor those interested in the etymology of these: grep is from the ed command (which itself is short for editor, the original Unix text editor) g/re/p, which Globally searches for a Regular Expression and Prints it. sed is Stream EDitor. vi is VIsual editor, which is so named because it's like ed but shows you what you're editing. Not sure where the name awk comes from. All of these tools are closely related to the venerable ed(1) command.
- lainga 8y agoalso - not pointing any fingers - I suspect for the same reason hexadecimal (which programmers shortened to hex) was used over the proper Latin sexadecimal.