Etymology of linux commands [closed]

Answer 1

Many UNIX commands historically had short names so that less had to be typed into the terminal back in the days when slow teletypes were used, to some degree the tradition has stuck even today.

As for the MCI thing, they had several addresses beginning with 1101, MCI is 1101 in Roman Numerals.

Answer 2

I know of the tools more and less which are obviously related. They show the contents of a file in small chunks so they can be shown on a screen. And in this case less is more than more.

Answer 3

sed = stream editor ... but I can't help thinking, That's not what I sed! Coincidence?

Answer 4

zsh was the login of its author Zhong Shao

Answer 5

This answer to the wedding cake question gave me a new insight on what's really the motivation behind those names ....

martial crontab:

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - until death
# (/marriage/crontab.XXX installed on Sat Apr  4 11:26:10 2009)
# (Cron version V5.0 -- $Id: crontab.c,v 1.12 2004/01/23 18:56:42 vixie Exp $)
0 21 * * * unzip; strip; touch; grep; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; umount; sleep

Answer 6

MCI = 1101 in Romans Numerals... I never clicked that until just now :)