[TUHS] 'Command subcommand ...' history

[Tim Bradshaw]

Lots of tools now seem to use this strategy: there's some kind of wrapper which has its own set of commands (which in turn might have further subcommands).  So for instance

    git remote add ...

is a two layer thing.

Without getting into an argument about whether that's a reasonable or ideologically-correct approach, I was wondering what the early examples of this kind of wrapper-command approach were.  I think the first time I noticed it was CVS, which made you say `cvs co ...` where RCS & SCCS had a bunch of individual commands (actually: did SCCS?).  But I think it's possible to argue that ifconfig was an earlier example of the same thing.  I was thinking about dd as well, but I don't think that's the same: they're really options not commands I think.

Relatedly, does this style originate on some other OS?

--tim

(I realise that in the case of many of these things, particularly git, the wrapper is just dispatching to other tools that do the werk: it's the command style I'm interested in not how it's implemented.)