On 5/31/16 3:27 AM, Doug McIlroy wrote:
What's the mnmonic significance, if any, of the u
in
the bash builtin read -u for reading from a specified
file descriptor? Evidently both f and d had already been
taken in analogy to usage in some other commands.
The best I can think of is u as in "tape unit", which
was common usage back in the days of READ INPUT TAPE 5.
That would make it the work of an old timer, maybe Dave Korn?
I picked it up from ksh many years ago, and assumed at the time that it
meant `unit'.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU chet(a)case.edu
http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/