> Giving cryptic names to software is a well-established UNIX tradition
God, this is so true! I seriously think that world would be much better already if we would just rename many of well-established binaries and C-functions to more-intuitive, better convention. Even without changing APIs that much (which would be great too, of course).
Good luck with that. We can't even give the creat() system call an 'e' at the end.
(Not that it should be used much these days; the 'creat() then open()' idiom is a race condition waiting to happen, so 'open()' has grown the ability to create-and-open in one atomic operation. That seems to handle most of the file creation that Unix programs need to do.)
God, this is so true! I seriously think that world would be much better already if we would just rename many of well-established binaries and C-functions to more-intuitive, better convention. Even without changing APIs that much (which would be great too, of course).