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311 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.404s | source
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plorkyeran ◴[] No.46237424[source]
> grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference). Even when abbreviated, these names were either functional descriptions or systematic derivations.

If you asked someone unfamiliar with unix tools what they thought each of these commands did, diff is the only one which they would have even the slightest chance of guessing. It's ridiculous to complain about "libsodium" and then hold up "awk" as a good name.

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bee_rider ◴[] No.46238337[source]
I’m not sure I like awk, sed, or cat, I think these are just names we’re used to, not good really. diff seems ok.

grep almost has an onomatopoeic nature to it… like, it sounds like you are grabbing or ripping the patterns out of the file, right?

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1. squigz ◴[] No.46240190[source]
They're good names because they're short and easily recognizable
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2. lmm ◴[] No.46240503[source]
There are only so many short names to go around.