24 Mar
2017
24 Mar
'17
4:44 p.m.
On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 03:42:02PM +0000, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
Lots of tools now seem to use this strategy:
there's some kind of wrapper which has its own set of commands (which in turn might
have further subcommands). So for instance
git remote add ...
is a two layer thing.
Without getting into an argument about whether that's a reasonable or
ideologically-correct approach, I was wondering what the early examples of this kind of
wrapper-command approach were. I think the first time I noticed it was CVS, which made
you say `cvs co ...` where RCS & SCCS had a bunch of individual commands (actually:
did SCCS?). But I think it's possible to argue that ifconfig was an earlier example
of the same thing. I was thinking about dd as well, but I don't think that's
the same: they're really options not commands I think.
BSD's sccs wrapper worked this way, I believe thats where I saw it first.