Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!enea!kuling!irf
From: irf@kuling.UUCP (Stellan Bergman)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: UNIX NAME ABBREVIATIONS
Message-ID: <564@kuling.UUCP>
Date: 1 Dec 87 07:30:45 GMT
References: <10376@brl-adm.ARPA> <16550@topaz.rutgers.edu> <388@cogen.UUCP> <6706@brl-smoke.ARPA> <7996@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> <897@pembina.UUCP>
Reply-To: irf@kuling.UUCP (Stellan Bergman)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden
Lines: 14

In article <897@pembina.UUCP> steve@pembina.UUCP (Steve Sutphen) writes:
>One command (that first appeared in Version 5 in 5/15/74) that isn't
>immediately obvious in its entymology is `dd'.  My guess is that the 
>author really wanted to call it `cc' (for Convert and Copy -- the
>title on the `man' page) but that letter pair was already used.

I always thought that this command was a copy of the corresponding
IBM/JCL command.  After all it is not very UNIX-like with a syntax

  dd if=/dev/rmt0 ibs=800 conv=ascii,lcase

or whatever. (Remember that "SYSIN DD *" torture ...?)

Bo Thide', Swedish Institute of Space Physics, UUCP: ..enea!kuling!irfu!bt