1 Oct
2024
1 Oct
'24
2 a.m.
On 9/30/24 15:15, Henry Bent wrote:
On Mon, 30 Sept 2024 at 14:08, Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This makes me wonder when the `apropos` command was introduced; surely
the name was also somewhat of an obscure joke ("what is apropos of
listing a directory?" is not exactly the phrase that springs
immediately to mind when wondering how to list a directory).
Looks like it was introduced in 2BSD, written by Bill Joy, though the
4.4BSD manpage claims that it was introduced in 3BSD. Neither the BSD
source nor manpage are particularly enlightening about the choice of name.
I was one of the Berkeley grad students in the office with Bill Joy
around this time. I think the name probably come from the "apropos"
command in Emacs. That command is mentioned here:
https://worrydream.com/refs/Stallman_1979_-_EMACS,_The_Extensible,_Customiz…,
which is dated June 1979, but the Emacs command existed before that
date. The Berkeley source code is dated 1979:
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2BSD/src/apropos.c
I had used Emacs at MIT as an undergraduate. Bill would sometimes ask
me, "how do they do that in Emacs", or ITS, and then riff on a feature
and put it into vi or whatever. Whether I suggested an "apropos" Unix
command or someone wanted something like that, or I said, "sounds like
'apropos' in Emacs", I don't remember.
Dan H