10 ms·

In Unix, what do some obscurely named commands stand for? (2018)

90 points by frereubu 6y ago

dhruvmittal 6y ago
Fascinating, never knew the biff one.
- aequitas 6y ago
  Could it be this was the name inspiration for Mutt?
  - leephillips 6y ago
    ‘As development progressed, features found in other popular clients such as PINE and MUSH have been added, the result being a hybrid, or "mutt."’ http://www.mutt.org/ http://www.mutt.org/
    - quicklime 6y ago
      It’s great to have a list of what things stand for, but someone needs to make a list of all the puns! A few more that I can think of: more -> less pico (pine composer) -> nano sh (Bourne) -> bash (Bourne again) yacc -> bison
      - kevinmgranger 6y ago
        Could vim be considered a pun? It's just vi improved, but vim itself means "energy / enthusiasm"
        jandrese 6y ago
        Vim used to include a line from Sherman and Sherman's song: The wonderful thing about tiggers They're loaded with vim and vigor
      - andreareina 6y ago
        elm (ELectronic Mail) -> pine (Pine Is Not Elm) ETA: apache (a patchy server)[1] emacs of course is Editor MACroS, but it's got a few community-provided backronyms, I'm partial to eight megabytes and constantly swapping and escape-meta-alt-shift. [1] http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/open_source_rewrite_history.html http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/open_source_rewrite_hist...
EarthIsHome 6y ago
I didn't know grep! I've seen grep used as a verb enough times that the word "grep" just intuitively seems to describe what it does: grep things. I was hoping dd would be listed.[0] Edit: digging a little deeper into [0], there's a Unix Acronym List linked [1]. There seems to be various definitions for dd. One definition says that dd stands for copy and convert, but since cc was already taken for the C compiler, dd was used. [0]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6804/what-does-dd-stand-for https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6804/what-does-dd-s... [1]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.misc/LbLTa00Jnvg https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.misc/LbLTa...
- dghughes 6y ago
  Isn't dd "disk duplication"?
  - tenebrisalietum 6y ago
    It shouldn't be because it will work with normal files just fine. E.g. if you want to image a disk, `dd if=/dev/sdc of=sdc.img` and silly things like `dd if=/etc/passwd of=/root/~passwd` work too. Also it has a convert function so it's not strictly just for duplication.
  - jxcl 6y ago
    Or if swap your of and if arguments, disk destroyer. :)
  - soneil 6y ago
    You'd think so, since that's the main thing it's used for anymore. But check the output of --help. Changing case, ascii to ebcdic, doesn't really fit the bill.
    - saalweachter 6y ago
      You don't re-encode your disk from ASCII to EBCDIC when duplicating it? Have I been doing it wrong all of these years?
brian_herman__ 6y ago
tac is cat spelled backwards it prints the contents in reverse order.
- jooize 6y ago
  How is input to a pipe reversed?
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    By saving all the input in memory (EDIT: or to a file, as another comment points out) until EOF, then writing the lines out in reverse order. It's not really possible to do in a stateless/streaming way.
  - wolfgang42 6y ago
    It’s written to a seekable tempfile first: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/6a3d2883fed853ee01079477020091068074e12d/src/tac.c#L542-L556 https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/6a3d2883fed853ee...
the-dude 6y ago
Is YACC considered a command? Yet Another Compiler Compiler IIRC.
- wahern 6y ago
  Sure, why not. And unlike roff/nroff/troff it actually made it into POSIX. yacc is part of the optional C-Language Development Utilities command set: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/yacc.html https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/y...
  - technofiend 6y ago
    And it bears mentioning {n,g,t}roff is a reference to RUNOFF, a CTSS formatting program which later made it into other operating systems at least by name if not an actual port. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF I always thought it was quite clever that the macro switch to roff is -m and therefore to format man pages, you run roff -man. Publishing my resume in man format didn't get the reaction I thought it might. Most people just asked for it again in some other format and only one or two people only ever got the joke that a UNIX sysadmin's resume was in -man format.
- codegladiator 6y ago
  The command compiles
  - the-dude 6y ago
    I see what you did there.
TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago
> cat > Catenate TIL the words concatenate and catenate exist, although they seem to have almost the same exact meaning
- leephillips 6y ago
  And neither one is “obscure”, by a long shot.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I haven’t heard people use catenate much.
- dx87 6y ago
  I'd heard of concatenate, but never catenate. I guess concatenate is a verb, and catenate is an adjective.
  - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    "Concatenate" seems redundant to me, as the Latin prefix "con" means "together" and the root "caten" is a chain. So technically it's "chain together", but a chain is already a thing that is linked together. My Latin is rusty, but IIRC "con" can optionally just be added for emphasis, e.g. "iacere": to throw, but "conicere":to hurl. Maybe that's what was done here.
    - i_am_programmer 6y ago
      Links in a chain are already together. You absolutely can chain 2 things together that are not the chain itself. Where chain is used as a verb to describe the tying of things together. Saying chain together absolutely makes sence. Example "His ankles were chained together".
  - mprovost 6y ago
    I thought maybe they chose "cat"enate to avoid a naming clash with a "con" command but looking back through the early Unix sources there doesn't appear to have been one.
leephillips 6y ago
On my Ubuntu laptop, egrep is just a script that calls grep with -E. Did egrep absorb grep? Is the old grep still commonly installed with any distributions? EDIT: and fgrep also is a script that calls grep, with the F argument.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I think it's common on several distributions for egrep, fgrep, zgrep, etc to all link to (or have small shell wrappers for) grep, which is gnu grep. I would guess the various BSD distros have traditional separate greps.
  - fanf2 6y ago
    No, for a long time the BSDs usually used GNU grep, though there is a newer BSD grep for those who are more concerned about the GPL than performance FreeBSD bsdgrep https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/grep https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/grep (see the makefile for build options, and note that it does egrep and fgrep too) FreeBSD GNU grep https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/gnu/usr.bin/grep/ https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/gnu/usr.bin/grep/ NetBSD has bsdgrep only http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/usr.bin/grep/ http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/usr.bin/grep/ (observe nothing but the Attic in src/gnu/usr.bin/grep) OpenBSD too http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/grep/ http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/grep/ 4.3BSD-Reno and 4.4BSD are complicated - looks like the Bell Labs separate greps have been moved aside in favour of a replacement unified grep by James Woods (not GNU grep) -https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD-Reno/src/usr.bin/grep https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD-Reno/sr... - https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.4BSD/usr/src/usr.bin/grep https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.4BSD/usr/src... There is no grep in 4.3BSD-Net/2 which was the first mostly complete unencumbered BSD release and the original basis of the open source BSDs - https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=Net2/usr/src/usr.bin https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=Net2/usr/src/u... - so they adopted GNU grep to fill the gap as you can see in the FreeBSD-2.0 source https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/2.0/gnu/usr.bin/ https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/2.0/gnu/usr.bin/
- deleted 6y ago
FerretFred 6y ago
fdisk - it wouldn't be polite to expand this, but suffice to say it's onomatopoeic if you get the syntax wrong (source: been there, done that).
- Sebb767 6y ago
  There is also fsck, which is named after what you say when you need to use it :)
- cat199 6y ago
  iirc linux fdisk was named after the dos (cpm?) utility of the same name, and so isn't really a unix command.
  - JdeBP 6y ago
    MS/PC-DOS 2 is when fixed disc partitioning came along.
- gorkish 6y ago
  The true obscura in the history of fdisk is when it became 263044usa8
japhyr 6y ago
For anyone interested in the history of UNIX development, Brian Kernhigan's "UNIX: A History and a Memoir" is a quick and enlightening read. I loved the history, and I came away with a better understanding of today's cli environment as well. https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552/ https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...
- jandrese 6y ago
  I found the title a little misleading. A better title might have been "A History of Bell Labs Center 1127". A large chunk of the book is anecdotes about the people who worked with Mr. Kernhigan, most of which are delightful. I highly recommend the book. There's a huge section on how they had to hack the hell out of their new printer to get it to work properly. Printer drivers have been crap and the hardware cursed since the invention of printers.
FillardMillmore 6y ago
Some of these seem fairly intuitive once you learn the origin - others, like "biff", you'd never guess. > "I can confirm the origin of biff, if you're interested. Biff was Heidi Stettner's dog, back when Heidi (and I, and Bill Joy) were all grad students at U.C. Berkeley and the early versions of BSD were being developed. Biff was popular among the residents of Evans Hall, and was known for barking at the mailman, hence the name of the command." Considering the command is used for mail notifications, it's actually quite clever.
jedberg 6y ago
> Biff was Heidi Stettner's dog, back when Heidi (and I, and Bill Joy) were all grad students at U.C. Berkeley and the early versions of BSD were being developed. Biff was popular among the residents of Evans Hall, and was known for barking at the mailman, hence the name of the command." For those who are into history, if you want to visit historic Evans hall, where a lot of the early BSD work was done, do it quickly. They want to tear it down soon. They are already working on plans for replacement and it will be the highest priority building project at UC Berkeley when new construction funding is released. Sadly, the building is seismically unfit.
- ar_lan 6y ago
  It's also the ugliest building known to man (and I believe the Unabomber taught there!)
  - jedberg 6y ago
    > It's also the ugliest building known to man It's a brutalist masterpiece, that's for sure. > (and I believe the Unabomber taught there!) That is a common myth that even the University pedals, but turns out it's impossible. He taught at Cal in 1969 and the building was erected in 1971. Turns out he actually taught in the temp buildings the math department was in when the built the building, which have since been torn down.
joezydeco 6y ago
How about rn (read news (i.e. Usenet)) and then trn (threaded read news)?
drallison 6y ago
dvd as an abbreviation for Dasvidaniya, which in Russian means goodbye. Dasvidaniya is actually two words, not one: до (until) and свида́ния (meeting / date). So literally it means “until the next meeting“. Dasvidaniya is a formal way to say goodbye and should be used with people you don't know and those older than you.(Cribbed with Google's help from learnrussianwords.com.) dvd removed files in Unix Version 6 and earlier. If memory serves, it operated directly on the file system data structures and was useful for recovering when the file system got "stuck".
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  Share any references if you got them. I checked http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/ http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/ - nothing shows up. This reminded me of the `clri` command which deletes an inode by number, reclaiming it if it is unlinked in the filesystem, if I remember correctly.
  - JdeBP 6y ago
    dcheck, icheck, and clri were in 6th Edition. You can read about them in the Fielder and Hunter book on AT&T Unix System 5 Release 4, which describes them as "antiques" that one should only use if one's Unix has no fsck. (-:
jeffreygoesto 6y ago
Perl is "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister" [0], but don't tell anybody ;-) [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#cite_note-63 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#cite_note-63
hibbelig 6y ago
"cu" was before my time, I've never used it. But it's still there on my Mac. I can never remember whether "bc" or "dc" is the program I want when I think I might need a little calculator.

90 points by frereubu 6y ago

dhruvmittal 6y ago

Fascinating, never knew the biff one.

aequitas 6y ago
Could it be this was the name inspiration for Mutt?
- leephillips 6y ago
  ‘As development progressed, features found in other popular clients such as PINE and MUSH have been added, the result being a hybrid, or "mutt."’ http://www.mutt.org/ http://www.mutt.org/
  - quicklime 6y ago
    It’s great to have a list of what things stand for, but someone needs to make a list of all the puns! A few more that I can think of: more -> less pico (pine composer) -> nano sh (Bourne) -> bash (Bourne again) yacc -> bison
    - kevinmgranger 6y ago
      Could vim be considered a pun? It's just vi improved, but vim itself means "energy / enthusiasm"
      - jandrese 6y ago
        Vim used to include a line from Sherman and Sherman's song: The wonderful thing about tiggers They're loaded with vim and vigor
    - andreareina 6y ago
      elm (ELectronic Mail) -> pine (Pine Is Not Elm) ETA: apache (a patchy server)[1] emacs of course is Editor MACroS, but it's got a few community-provided backronyms, I'm partial to eight megabytes and constantly swapping and escape-meta-alt-shift. [1] http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/open_source_rewrite_history.html http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/open_source_rewrite_hist...

EarthIsHome 6y ago

I didn't know grep! I've seen grep used as a verb enough times that the word "grep" just intuitively seems to describe what it does: grep things. I was hoping dd would be listed.[0] Edit: digging a little deeper into [0], there's a Unix Acronym List linked [1]. There seems to be various definitions for dd. One definition says that dd stands for copy and convert, but since cc was already taken for the C compiler, dd was used. [0]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6804/what-does-dd-stand-for https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6804/what-does-dd-s... [1]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.misc/LbLTa00Jnvg https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.misc/LbLTa...

dghughes 6y ago
Isn't dd "disk duplication"?
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  It shouldn't be because it will work with normal files just fine. E.g. if you want to image a disk, `dd if=/dev/sdc of=sdc.img` and silly things like `dd if=/etc/passwd of=/root/~passwd` work too. Also it has a convert function so it's not strictly just for duplication.
- jxcl 6y ago
  Or if swap your of and if arguments, disk destroyer. :)
- soneil 6y ago
  You'd think so, since that's the main thing it's used for anymore. But check the output of --help. Changing case, ascii to ebcdic, doesn't really fit the bill.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    You don't re-encode your disk from ASCII to EBCDIC when duplicating it? Have I been doing it wrong all of these years?

brian_herman__ 6y ago

tac is cat spelled backwards it prints the contents in reverse order.

jooize 6y ago
How is input to a pipe reversed?
- umanwizard 6y ago
  By saving all the input in memory (EDIT: or to a file, as another comment points out) until EOF, then writing the lines out in reverse order. It's not really possible to do in a stateless/streaming way.
- wolfgang42 6y ago
  It’s written to a seekable tempfile first: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/6a3d2883fed853ee01079477020091068074e12d/src/tac.c#L542-L556 https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/6a3d2883fed853ee...

the-dude 6y ago

Is YACC considered a command? Yet Another Compiler Compiler IIRC.

wahern 6y ago
Sure, why not. And unlike roff/nroff/troff it actually made it into POSIX. yacc is part of the optional C-Language Development Utilities command set: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/yacc.html https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/y...
- technofiend 6y ago
  And it bears mentioning {n,g,t}roff is a reference to RUNOFF, a CTSS formatting program which later made it into other operating systems at least by name if not an actual port. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF I always thought it was quite clever that the macro switch to roff is -m and therefore to format man pages, you run roff -man. Publishing my resume in man format didn't get the reaction I thought it might. Most people just asked for it again in some other format and only one or two people only ever got the joke that a UNIX sysadmin's resume was in -man format.
codegladiator 6y ago
The command compiles
- the-dude 6y ago
  I see what you did there.

TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago

> cat > Catenate TIL the words concatenate and catenate exist, although they seem to have almost the same exact meaning

leephillips 6y ago
And neither one is “obscure”, by a long shot.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I haven’t heard people use catenate much.
dx87 6y ago
I'd heard of concatenate, but never catenate. I guess concatenate is a verb, and catenate is an adjective.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  "Concatenate" seems redundant to me, as the Latin prefix "con" means "together" and the root "caten" is a chain. So technically it's "chain together", but a chain is already a thing that is linked together. My Latin is rusty, but IIRC "con" can optionally just be added for emphasis, e.g. "iacere": to throw, but "conicere":to hurl. Maybe that's what was done here.
  - i_am_programmer 6y ago
    Links in a chain are already together. You absolutely can chain 2 things together that are not the chain itself. Where chain is used as a verb to describe the tying of things together. Saying chain together absolutely makes sence. Example "His ankles were chained together".
- mprovost 6y ago
  I thought maybe they chose "cat"enate to avoid a naming clash with a "con" command but looking back through the early Unix sources there doesn't appear to have been one.

leephillips 6y ago

On my Ubuntu laptop, egrep is just a script that calls grep with -E. Did egrep absorb grep? Is the old grep still commonly installed with any distributions? EDIT: and fgrep also is a script that calls grep, with the F argument.

tyingq 6y ago
I think it's common on several distributions for egrep, fgrep, zgrep, etc to all link to (or have small shell wrappers for) grep, which is gnu grep. I would guess the various BSD distros have traditional separate greps.
- fanf2 6y ago
  No, for a long time the BSDs usually used GNU grep, though there is a newer BSD grep for those who are more concerned about the GPL than performance FreeBSD bsdgrep https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/grep https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/grep (see the makefile for build options, and note that it does egrep and fgrep too) FreeBSD GNU grep https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/gnu/usr.bin/grep/ https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/gnu/usr.bin/grep/ NetBSD has bsdgrep only http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/usr.bin/grep/ http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/usr.bin/grep/ (observe nothing but the Attic in src/gnu/usr.bin/grep) OpenBSD too http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/grep/ http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/grep/ 4.3BSD-Reno and 4.4BSD are complicated - looks like the Bell Labs separate greps have been moved aside in favour of a replacement unified grep by James Woods (not GNU grep) -https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD-Reno/src/usr.bin/grep https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD-Reno/sr... - https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.4BSD/usr/src/usr.bin/grep https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.4BSD/usr/src... There is no grep in 4.3BSD-Net/2 which was the first mostly complete unencumbered BSD release and the original basis of the open source BSDs - https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=Net2/usr/src/usr.bin https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=Net2/usr/src/u... - so they adopted GNU grep to fill the gap as you can see in the FreeBSD-2.0 source https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/2.0/gnu/usr.bin/ https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/2.0/gnu/usr.bin/
deleted 6y ago

FerretFred 6y ago

fdisk - it wouldn't be polite to expand this, but suffice to say it's onomatopoeic if you get the syntax wrong (source: been there, done that).

Sebb767 6y ago
There is also fsck, which is named after what you say when you need to use it :)
cat199 6y ago
iirc linux fdisk was named after the dos (cpm?) utility of the same name, and so isn't really a unix command.
- JdeBP 6y ago
  MS/PC-DOS 2 is when fixed disc partitioning came along.
gorkish 6y ago
The true obscura in the history of fdisk is when it became 263044usa8

japhyr 6y ago

For anyone interested in the history of UNIX development, Brian Kernhigan's "UNIX: A History and a Memoir" is a quick and enlightening read. I loved the history, and I came away with a better understanding of today's cli environment as well. https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552/ https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...

jandrese 6y ago
I found the title a little misleading. A better title might have been "A History of Bell Labs Center 1127". A large chunk of the book is anecdotes about the people who worked with Mr. Kernhigan, most of which are delightful. I highly recommend the book. There's a huge section on how they had to hack the hell out of their new printer to get it to work properly. Printer drivers have been crap and the hardware cursed since the invention of printers.

FillardMillmore 6y ago

Some of these seem fairly intuitive once you learn the origin - others, like "biff", you'd never guess. > "I can confirm the origin of biff, if you're interested. Biff was Heidi Stettner's dog, back when Heidi (and I, and Bill Joy) were all grad students at U.C. Berkeley and the early versions of BSD were being developed. Biff was popular among the residents of Evans Hall, and was known for barking at the mailman, hence the name of the command." Considering the command is used for mail notifications, it's actually quite clever.

jedberg 6y ago

> Biff was Heidi Stettner's dog, back when Heidi (and I, and Bill Joy) were all grad students at U.C. Berkeley and the early versions of BSD were being developed. Biff was popular among the residents of Evans Hall, and was known for barking at the mailman, hence the name of the command." For those who are into history, if you want to visit historic Evans hall, where a lot of the early BSD work was done, do it quickly. They want to tear it down soon. They are already working on plans for replacement and it will be the highest priority building project at UC Berkeley when new construction funding is released. Sadly, the building is seismically unfit.

ar_lan 6y ago
It's also the ugliest building known to man (and I believe the Unabomber taught there!)
- jedberg 6y ago
  > It's also the ugliest building known to man It's a brutalist masterpiece, that's for sure. > (and I believe the Unabomber taught there!) That is a common myth that even the University pedals, but turns out it's impossible. He taught at Cal in 1969 and the building was erected in 1971. Turns out he actually taught in the temp buildings the math department was in when the built the building, which have since been torn down.

joezydeco 6y ago

How about rn (read news (i.e. Usenet)) and then trn (threaded read news)?

drallison 6y ago

dvd as an abbreviation for Dasvidaniya, which in Russian means goodbye. Dasvidaniya is actually two words, not one: до (until) and свида́ния (meeting / date). So literally it means “until the next meeting“. Dasvidaniya is a formal way to say goodbye and should be used with people you don't know and those older than you.(Cribbed with Google's help from learnrussianwords.com.) dvd removed files in Unix Version 6 and earlier. If memory serves, it operated directly on the file system data structures and was useful for recovering when the file system got "stuck".

tenebrisalietum 6y ago
Share any references if you got them. I checked http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/ http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/ - nothing shows up. This reminded me of the `clri` command which deletes an inode by number, reclaiming it if it is unlinked in the filesystem, if I remember correctly.
- JdeBP 6y ago
  dcheck, icheck, and clri were in 6th Edition. You can read about them in the Fielder and Hunter book on AT&T Unix System 5 Release 4, which describes them as "antiques" that one should only use if one's Unix has no fsck. (-:

jeffreygoesto 6y ago

Perl is "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister" [0], but don't tell anybody ;-) [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#cite_note-63 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#cite_note-63

hibbelig 6y ago

"cu" was before my time, I've never used it. But it's still there on my Mac. I can never remember whether "bc" or "dc" is the program I want when I think I might need a little calculator.