There's a tribal aspect, too; not to mention jargon as a barrier to entry. And what professional wants to forgo hard-won knowledge? That said, I kind of like t

There's a tribal aspect, too; not to mention jargon as a barrier to entry. And what professional wants to forgo hard-won knowledge? That said, I kind of like the weird names, esp grep. (Wasn't that in Stranger in a Strange Land or something?) But I do object to inconsistent options. One example is: mkdir -p a/b/c This will make all three nested directories, if needed; but there is no equivalent: mv -p x a/b/c/y There also isn't: cp -p a/b/c [1]. You have to create the nested destination directories (a/b/c) first. [1] cp has a -p option, but with a different meaning... BTW: It would be nice if HackerNews had the `` markdown of Reddit for inline code. There's been a bit of code sharing recently, and I like that in a "hacker" site.