From T. E. GROVES
Mr David Brenner (Letters, 21 September) evidently got his information
off a cereal packet. Here are the real origins: GREP is General Regular
Expression Pattern-matching, a little cryptic but not arbitrary. AWK stands
for Aho, Weinberger and Kernigan, who invented it (and the bird on the manual
is a Great Auk, not a penguin). CAT means catalogue, which makes just as
much sense as TYPE but a little less than LIST. MAN is for Manual, obvious
really, and appropriate since they aren’t very helpful. Finally BIFF comes
from Bell Interchange File Format – it refers to a standard.
UNIX commands are usually short to save keystrokes, which makes them
convenient to type but hard to remember (and hell to read).
T. E. Groves Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey
