From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Cc: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager
Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 18:40:18 -0400 (EDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200621224018.DBFFA18C09A@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> (raw)
> From: Michael Siegel
> there's no need to write out "less" every time. You can just alias that
> to "pg" without causing any harm and save two letters, which is an
> improvement for a task that is performed manually rather often.
It always surpised me that there wasn't more of this - abbreviating the names
of the most-used commands, to minimize typing - or more specifically,
run-length encoding them based on how frequently they were used, with the
most-used ones given the shortest names.
The MIT-DSSR PWB1 system had a pager called just 'p' (source here:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s2/p.c
if anyone wants to see it; the man page is dated Apr/77); and 'ls' was tweaked
to recognize the command name 'l' as an alias for 'ls -ls'.
Of course, aliases didn't exist in the shell back then, which was why the
command had to be coded to recognize the short form, and act differently.
(And /bin/l was linked to /bin/ls.)
'l' and 'p' are _still_ aliased in my shell,to this day!
> I hope it's okay that I chose to reply just to the list address and take
> all the other addresses out.
'That's not a bug, that's a feature!'
I always delete other addresses when replying to a list, unless I think someone
might not be subscribed to that list.
Noel
next reply other threads:[~2020-06-21 22:41 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 18+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-06-21 22:40 Noel Chiappa [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2020-06-14 22:52 Warren Toomey
2020-06-14 23:37 ` Mary Ann Horton
2020-06-15 0:32 ` Nemo Nusquam
2020-06-15 5:41 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2020-06-15 13:56 ` Clem Cole
2020-06-15 14:15 ` Mary Ann Horton
2020-06-15 14:56 ` Clem Cole
2020-06-15 15:04 ` Richard Salz
2020-06-15 16:14 ` Clem Cole
2020-06-15 15:45 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2020-06-15 19:08 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2020-06-21 18:49 ` Michael Siegel
2020-06-22 0:35 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-06-22 16:24 ` Derek Fawcus
2020-06-22 21:33 ` Rob Pike
2020-06-22 21:58 ` Kurt H Maier
2020-06-18 12:49 ` Michael Siegel
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