[TUHS] etymology of cron
Larry McVoy
lm at mcvoy.com
Fri Dec 25 11:05:48 AEST 2015
What's troubling is wikipedia, I didn't realize they were that much of a pain.
On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 04:52:33PM -0800, scj at yaccman.com wrote:
> This has been a somewhat bizarre and troubling thread, all in all.
>
> Would anybody want to discuss the origin of 'ls'? Or 'at'?
>
> Steve
>
> PS: (that was NOT a serious suggestion!)
>
>
>
> > On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 10:17:53 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> >> Clem Cole scripsit:
> >>
> >>> Rik in his role as the editor of ;login is going to try work with Doug
> >>> and
> >>> to get something "published" into the next edition which should satisfy
> >>> the
> >>> Wikipedia folks. There is a minor issue is that Rik is technically
> >>> past
> >>> the deadline but due to the holiday, there are a few days of grace that
> >>> the
> >>> workers putting the issue together have said they will thankfully try
> >>> to
> >>> handle.
> >>>
> >>> So maybe we can have get this fixed shortly.
> >>
> >> I don't think so. Is ;login: a peer-reviewed journal? It doesn't
> >> look like it to me.
> >
> > One of the original references was from the proceedings of an AUUG
> > conference. From personal experience I can confirm that the level of
> > review for the conferences fell far short of what USENIX did.
> >
> >> Still, the current state says:
> >>
> >> The origin of the name cron is from the Greek word for
> >> time, ???????????? (chronos), according to its author Ken
> >> Thompson[2][better source needed]. Others have suggested that the
> >> name comes from the Greek God Chronos[3] or that it is an acronym
> >> for "Command Run On Notice"[4] or "Commands Run Over Night",[5]
> >> but the references lack substantiation.
> >>
> >> Even if someone is still grumbling on the talk page, that doesn't
> >> substantially misrepresent anything that I can see.
> >
> > Yes, that last sentence was my update. As I mentioned in an earlier
> > message, I think that it's appropriate that it should stay, if only to
> > stop people making the claim again in a more forceful manner.
> >
> > But it would be nice to be able to remove the [better source needed].
> > It seems that there's only one person objecting to the changes. I've
> > asked him on the talk page what he really wants.
> >
> > Greg
> > --
> > Sent from my desktop computer.
> > Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
> > See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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> > problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua
> >
>
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
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