Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!codas!ablnc!maxwell
From: maxwell@ablnc.ATT.COM (Robert Maxwell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: More John Dvorak comments
Summary: Won't always work
Message-ID: <560@ablnc.ATT.COM>
Date: 2 Sep 88 20:35:43 GMT
References: <18509@neabbs.UUCP> <24516@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <31930@clyde.ATT.COM> <1185@plx.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T, Maitland, Florida
Lines: 31

In article <1185@plx.UUCP>, walt@plx.UUCP (Walt Novinger ) writes:
> In article <1028@mtund.ATT.COM> smc@mtund.UUCP (Steven Casagrande) writes:
> >In article <9837@bellcore.bellcore.com> tr@wind.UUCP (tom reingold) writes:
> >>Ward says that he likes Unix but prefers the command names of DOS
> >>because they are less cryptic.
> >>
> >Who cares if the Unix commands are cryptic?  It is relatively easy
> >to write script files to "change" the name of ls, cp, rm, etc.
> >
> Why write script files? Seems to me that most *IX commands can be
> mapped nearly 1:1 with DOS (e.g. ls:dir, cp:copy). Simply create a 
> link to perform the mapping. To link a dir command to ls, for instance,
> simply become su and give the command "ln /usr/bin/ls /usr/bin/dir".

You will find a problem with this approach on some commands. For instance,
cp, mv and ln are the same executable (look at the link count). The command
relys on argv[0] to execute the correct sequence of opening, linking and 
unlinking the files. Linking cp to copy and then trying to execute the 
command "copy file1 file2" results in the following diagnostic message:
"copy: command must be named cp|mv|ln--defaults to cp"

I am sure you can find a number of commands that work the same way -
/bin/sh and /bin/rsh are the same file as are the editors vi, ex and edit.

If you use ksh, aliasing commands is simple, I usually use it to call a
command using options that are inconvenient to type, ie: ll=ls -CF
-- 
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R. M. Maxwell   AT&T IMS             |  I speak for nobody-
Maitland, FL    ablnc!jezebel!bob    |  not even myself.
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