4 ms·

I wonder why there few single character Unix commands? Was this intentional?

• jgtrosh 8y ago
  I don't know if it's intentional, but it would tend to increase name collisions with shell variables.
  • sverige 8y ago
    Plus all the good one character commands were already taken by the standard text editor, ed(1). It would have caused confusion.
  • jwilk 8y ago
    But commands and variables are in different namespaces.
• LunarFire 8y ago
  There used to be a type where 80x24 character terminals were a luxury, and even a type where printing commands and ouput actually meant printing on paper. Unix was developped in these times.
• gh02t 8y ago
  Purely speculation, but maybe because it makes a typo way more likely to invoke an actual command? If say, "rm" was just "r" and "find" was just "f"... well those keys are right next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard after all. Oops.
• loeg 8y ago
  One presentation on the topic claims that the keyboards of the day were very stiff, so they preferred typing as few characters as possible.
  • HeadlessChild 8y ago
    According to Hendrik Jan Thomassen [0] this is the reason. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5-DRLfzqD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5-DRLfzqD0
• s3m4j 8y ago
  They were sent over a network. Every baud counts. And then the output had to have a fixed width (not necessarily a fixed length, since it may have been printed on paper) because of "display" size.
  • federicoponzi 8y ago
    ^ This, and also because the keyboards back then were very hard to type on.
• kbob 8y ago
  Single letters were reserved for personal commands and aliases.
• tonto 8y ago
  Only one I know is w. Are to there others? Sometimes e is editor but I think that's alias