Unix Quote (was: Re: building a PDP11 from the things you

From: Mark Green <mark_at_cs.ualberta.ca>
Date: Fri Aug 10 20:27:05 2001

> It was thus said that the Great Carlos Murillo once stated:
> >
> > At 01:16 AM 8/10/01 -0400, you wrote:
> > > -spc (And can you explain the insanely different command line parameters
> > > to ls (typical Unix command line), find and dd? All three, I think
> > > are POSIX to some degree 8-)
> >
> > Mhh, care to highlight a particularly nasty difference in ls? (dd I know).
> > When in doubt, use sed. Except for a certain bug in the HPUX 10.20
> > release, it behaves quite uniformly across the board.
>
> What I was trying to say is that `ls' uses single letter options preceeded
> by a dash (-l -a -F), `find' uses full words with a dash (-print -follow)
> and `dd' uses words/abreviations without dashes (if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null
> count=45) and all three are found on every Unix system (at least, all the
> ones I've used and I've used a fair number of them).
>

If I remember correctly, dd was originally intended to emulate the dd
command on OS 360, so it doesn't look like any of the other Unix
commands. Originally, dd was used to deal with media produced by
other operating systems, which I think was the motivation for modeling
it after the dd command on OS 360. I recall reading this in the V6
manuals, so if anyone has easy access to a V6 they could check this.
Received on Fri Aug 10 2001 - 20:27:05 BST