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From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Subject: [TUHS] 'Command subcommand ...' history
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2017 08:44:01 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20170324154401.GG23802@mcvoy.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <29D69C88-7B0A-40F9-AF4D-68705E8FC514@tfeb.org>

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 03:42:02PM +0000, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> Lots of tools now seem to use this strategy: there's some kind of wrapper which has its own set of commands (which in turn might have further subcommands).  So for instance
> 
>     git remote add ...
> 
> is a two layer thing.
> 
> Without getting into an argument about whether that's a reasonable or ideologically-correct approach, I was wondering what the early examples of this kind of wrapper-command approach were.  I think the first time I noticed it was CVS, which made you say `cvs co ...` where RCS & SCCS had a bunch of individual commands (actually: did SCCS?).  But I think it's possible to argue that ifconfig was an earlier example of the same thing.  I was thinking about dd as well, but I don't think that's the same: they're really options not commands I think.

BSD's sccs wrapper worked this way, I believe thats where I saw it first.


  reply	other threads:[~2017-03-24 15:44 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2017-03-24 15:42 Tim Bradshaw
2017-03-24 15:44 ` Larry McVoy [this message]
2017-03-28  1:08   ` Clem Cole
2017-03-24 21:46 ` Arthur Krewat
2017-03-24 21:55 ` Paul Winalski
2017-03-28 19:55 Doug McIlroy

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