[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 12

[Doug McIlroy]

Arnold was clerly on the Unix Room wavelength. ^All those two-letter
commands were spelled out in conversation, even m-v. The pronunciation
of rmdir was hybrid: r-m-dir. But when one talked about an action--not
a command per se--verbs would be used: move or copy a file, list
a directory. The famous exception is grep, which became a verb. There
was no snappy ready-made verb that covered all the aspects of its use:
search for mentions in one file, find files that mention, look for
patterns, filter data, check for malformed data, ... The verb had
two idiomatic variants, "grep for" and "grep out".

Doug