Shell commands like to OS/2 shell (or MS PowerShell)

[Chris Tyler]

On Tue, 2010-04-20 at 01:51 +0300, Slava Zanko wrote:
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> Hi folk,
> 
> I want to propose new idea about names of command line utilites...
> 
> For example, all present utilites have sence just for guru's (ls, rm,
> fsck etc), but for novies it's hard to use. Is good idea to symlink'ing
> (shell aliasing) these and much more utilz to another names? Like to:
> 
> ls -> filesystem.list
> rm -> filesystem.remove
> fsck.* -> filesystem.check.*
> mkfs.* -> filesystem.make.*
> convert -> media.convert.image
> mencoder -> media.convert.video
> oggenc -> media.convert.audio.ogg
> mplayer -> media.player.*
> 
> etc
> 
> This idea will be easy to realize (need to make at first time one rpm
> package with lot of symlinks0007684a-0010long-time work in all present
> rpm-packages for respect this technology). But we need for
> standartization of alias names... in ideal case, standartization must
> touch all distros (new standard?)
> 
> P.S. This not my idea. Originally from:
> http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.linux.org.ru%2Fforum%2Ftalks%2F4797323&sl=ru&tl=en
> 
> Thanks for attention.

Actually, that's not a completely new idea -- Multics used links in
exactly this fashion decades ago, so that you could type the long or
short version of command names:

list                        ls
change_wdir                 cwd
print_wdir                  pwd
print_attach_table          pat
last_message_time           lmt
...etc...

However, the long names fell into disuse quickly, because ... no one
wants to type that much. I can almost guarantee the same thing would
happen now.

If you wanted to implement this, I would recommend using aliases rather
than symlinks. This is Open Source -- give it a whirl and see how you
like it, and if you do, then package it up and see whether its useful to
others.

-Chris