TIL what pwd means (and a bunch of others)

POSTED ON: Jul 25, 2022

TAGS: terminal history

Today I learned that pwd is short for "print working directory"

Some more random things:

• su stands for "switch Users"
• but sudo stands for "Superuser do"
• awk is named after Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan.

Awk is a utility that enables a programmer to write tiny but effective programs in the form of statements that define text patterns that are to be searched for in each line of a document and the action that is to be taken when a match is found within a line. Awk is mostly used for pattern scanning and processing. It searches one or more files to see if they contain lines that matches with the specified patterns and then perform the associated actions.

Alfred Aho is best known for his work on programming languages, compilers, and related algorithms, and his textbooks on the art and science of computer programming

Peter Weinberger was involved in Bell Labs, and now works at Google.

Brian Kernighan wrote the first book on C.

• pwd stands for "print working directory"

• . is a shortcut for CWD.

It's why you need to include ./ to execute a command in the working path. It's because the current working directory isn't part of $PATH.

• grep stands for "Global regular expression print".

• dd was originally cc for Convert and Copy, but cc was already being used for the C Compiler, so they just moved it one letter up in the alphabet.

via this post by r/deja_geek

Related TILs

Tagged: terminal

• Next: TIL High Resolution TimeThe Date object is no longer the recognized method for timing events because it is very imprecise and can be modified by the system clock.
• Previous: TIL about some sites to inspire youAfter years of web development, I've come to the conclusion that these sites are simply the most beautiful sites ever. If you ever need a inspiration, here you go.