[TUHS] Re: On computerese

[Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>]

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James Gosling used this idiomatic  JCL command (see loop body) in something
or other, and Brian and I borrowed it (with attribution) for the bundle
command in our book.

% cat /usr/local/plan9/bin/bundle

#!/bin/sh

echo '# To unbundle, run this file'

for i

do

echo "echo $i"

echo "sed 's/.//' >$i <<'//GO.SYSIN DD $i'"

sed "s/^/-/" $i

echo "//GO.SYSIN DD $i"

done

%


-rob

On Mon, Sep 16, 2024 at 3:31 PM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 16 Sept 2024 at 00:11, Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> You know, this is a place that might actually be able to provide a
>> definitive answer to me.  A brief web search found me asking the same
>> question in 1995.
>>
>> When I were a wee lad, I was told `dd` was short for `do DEBE`, which,
>> while obviously referencing a well-known movie about a Northern Texas
>> sports team and their most enthusiastic fan, also referred to the mainframe
>> software whose name was an acronym for `Does Everything But Eat` and whose
>> function was to copy data across sources with very different blocking and
>> representation conventions...which is kinda what `dd` does.
>>
>> Can anyone here confirm or deny that origin for the utility's name?
>>
>>
> I looked through a broad swath of dd source files and man pages from v5 to
> System III and SVR4, the BSD SCCS tree, various commercial UNIXes, modern
> BSDs, and modern Linux but none of them have any sort of explanation of the
> name.  I figured I'd at least find something!
>
> It is the case that many places refer to the command's function as
> "convert and copy," so I wonder if it's some sort of play on the fact that
> the expected name of the command might be "cc".
>
> -Henry
>

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