[TUHS] 'Command subcommand ...' history

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 03:42:02PM +0000, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> 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.

BSD's sccs wrapper worked this way, I believe thats where I saw it first.