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The question remains open for me. No one has a truly satisfactory explanation for the mnemonic 'ls'. Conventional wisdom is all I see, and that is usually eroded by time. Someone, somewhere, chose that symbol for a damn good reason, and it stuck. Is this discussion to be terminated? Then call for closure by the chair. Decrypting arcane symbols leads to better understanding.
It was chosen because it was a short name and because the 'l' of 'ls' can look like like a '1' in some typefaces and thereby confuses a few people...
Actually, what I don't understand is that very early computers would surely only use uppercase characters (restricting the character set saved on memory).
This was certainly the case with punched cards, which were extremely popular at one time.
Last edited by JeremyBoden; 03-04-2020 at 07:37 PM.
It was chosen because it was a short name and because the 'l' of 'ls' can look like like a '1' in some typefaces and thereby confuses a few people...
Actually, what I don't understand is that very early computers would surely only use uppercase characters (restricting the character set saved on memory).
This was certainly the case with punched cards, which were extremely popular at one time.
Yes. Punch cards were always interpreted as upper case letters, as were the characters on VDTs and ODTs (Video Display Terminal, Operator Display Terminal)
I once helped create an elaborate program to convert upper case customer data to mixed case on a Burroughs (might have been Unisys by then) A series ‘puter as part of the migration to Unix backends to Windows client programs.
No one has a truly satisfactory explanation for the mnemonic 'ls'.
Before my time but IMHO its one of those Occam's razor moment whereby "the simplest solution is most likely the right one". I am with jefro and both the article I originally posted and Wikipedia agree the linux ls command came from Unix which was inherited from a similar command in Multics which is short for the word list. Now why did the Multics developers shorten the command from list to ls is something we may never be able to find.
When you're typing commands on a 110 baud Teletype (TM) machine, every character saved is precious.
When you are writing FORTRAN IV on optical-mark cards (pencil, not punch) in high school, every character is really truly precious (IBM 11/30, 1972-3). I did get an 'A' for a four-line program that showed the awesome power of an iterated (for) loop and an extremely compact FORMAT (output) statement. Given that I prefer assembly language for speed and control of the processor per clock tick, well thought-out instruction mnemonics are vital. The ls said the better, I suppose. :-)
Before my time but IMHO its one of those Occam's razor moment whereby "the simplest solution is most likely the right one". I am with jefro and both the article I originally posted and Wikipedia agree the linux ls command came from Unix which was inherited from a similar command in Multics which is short for the word list. Now why did the Multics developers shorten the command from list to ls is something we may never be able to find.
"Those who cannot recall the past are condemned to relive it."
-- George Santayana
All lists are the result of some linear search, and so 'list' is a synonym.
In 'The Art of Computer Programming' (Knuth; 1973, et al) and entire volume (3rd) is devoted to Searching and Sorting. These are deep concepts at the root of all computer programs and independent of their implementations. Linux was developed on a 'host system'. The best system for language development in the 1980's-1990's was VAX/VMS. Unix was likely born on a PDP-11 in the 1970's. But that was along time ago. What came first, Linux or its compiler?
My first encounter with the 'dir' command was in using RT-11 in 1978. It performed a linear search of the current directory back in those days.
All squares are rectangles. Therefore, rectangle is a synonym of square.
The question remains open for me. or the mnemonic 'ls'.
Just shortness for typing, like 'cat' instead of concat(enate), 'cp' instead of copy and i.e. 'mv' for move. You see that often they remove the vowels to get a short command.
Other examples are ln (link), rm (remove), ps (processes status), etc.
So a lot of very short 2-letter commands were created in the original UNIX (which is in itself a pun to the Multics O/S).
Linux distro's are using the GNU (coreutils) versions of those utilities, which were created as an open source alternative TO those original UNIX commands (and actually are older then the Linux kernel and thus the whole of Linux itself).
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