22 Jun
2020
22 Jun
'20
4:40 a.m.
From: Michael Siegel
there's no need to write out "less"
every time. You can just alias that
to "pg" without causing any harm and save two letters, which is an
improvement for a task that is performed manually rather often.
It always surpised me that there wasn't more of this - abbreviating the names
of the most-used commands, to minimize typing - or more specifically,
run-length encoding them based on how frequently they were used, with the
most-used ones given the shortest names.
The MIT-DSSR PWB1 system had a pager called just 'p' (source here:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s2/p.c
if anyone wants to see it; the man page is dated Apr/77); and 'ls' was tweaked
to recognize the command name 'l' as an alias for 'ls -ls'.
Of course, aliases didn't exist in the shell back then, which was why the
command had to be coded to recognize the short form, and act differently.
(And /bin/l was linked to /bin/ls.)
'l' and 'p' are _still_ aliased in my shell,to this day!
I hope it's okay that I chose to reply just to
the list address and take
all the other addresses out.
'That's not a bug, that's a feature!'
I always delete other addresses when replying to a list, unless I think someone
might not be subscribed to that list.
Noel