Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The commands you list aren't too bad because they get quickly learned through use. And "grep" at least is pronounceable and feels strangely apt as a command name.

In general though I think the terseness of the standard Unix commands is a problem, particularly for less often used commands. Even after many years of using them I still get "du" and "df" confused, for example.




But how.. du = disk usage, df = disk free...


"Disk usage" could plausibly be the command that tells you how much space you've got left. Maybe "disk free" doesn't apply quite as well to du's function.

If I was designing them from scratch, I'd maybe call them something like "size" and "space" respectively.


> "Disk usage" could plausibly be the command that tells you how much space you've got left.

"Red touches yellow, you're an okay fellow. Red touches black, you're a dead jack"

It's a good thing there aren't any coral snakes around where I live.


I learned Unix in the mid 80s but it wasn't until sometime later I learned or had the epiphany that grep was shorthand for g/re/p. As in global search for regular expression and print the results. Talk about a forehead slapping moment. Not everything in Unix is immediately obvious.


The way I remember du and df is Disk Usage and Display (mounted) Filesystems, respectively.


I always remember them as "disk usage" and "disk free".


I always end up using both du and df because I can never remember which does what. Half the time, I also can’t remember their names even and have to look them up.

All of the really frequent commands, I can remember (cp, mv, cat, tar, head, tail, ls, mkdir, rm, grep, sed, and a handful of common programs like package managers and git) and everything else I can never remember and have to look up. I personally don’t like the unix command names, most don’t make much sense to me personally. Sure, I like that they’re short, but I can never remember them unless I use them a lot.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: