[TUHS] On computerese

[Greg A. Woods]

Catching up on the last month's worth of email....

At Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:05:52 -0400, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
Subject: [TUHS] Re: On computerese
> 
> On Sat, Sep 28, 2024 at 8:49 PM Aron Insinga <aki at insinga.com> wrote:
> 
> The terse Unix command verb style can be a steep learning curve for
> beginners.  How is one supposed to know that you say 'ls' to get a
> directory listing?  And unfortunately man pages aren't very useful for
> beginners because you have to know what the command verb is in order to
> call up its man page.  Unix lacks a place to ask questions such as "how do
> I get a directory listing?".

Actually Unix has "always" (since 7th Edition at least) had a place to
ask such questions!

As a Unix beginner back in 1980, using 7th Edition, I was taught, right
from the beginning, to use the permuted index to find things, which is
essentially what BSD apropos(1) does.  Of course anyone with even the
tiniest smattering of academic experience would expect to have an index
to use to find things, and for me taking this one step further with a
permuted index using the keywords from the one-line descriptions of
commands was a new and wonderful discovery.  I think I had a printed
copy of the Unix permuted index, though I don't remember for sure.

You can find ls(1) in the 7th Edition permuted index in three places:

                  ls   list   contents of directory.......    ls(1)
      ls   list contents of   directory...................    ls(1)
                       ls     list contents of directory..    ls(1)

The manual page for ls(1) is unfortunately missing one useful keyword in
the short description and using one less meaningful keyword.  Perhaps
the entry should have been more like:

	ls  \-  list the files in a directory

Anyway folks in my first-year classes didn't need, or shouldn't have
needed, to use the index to find ls(1) because we were given printed
copies of the 7th Edition's "UNIX For Beginners   Second Edition" by
BWK.  Perhaps the permuted index was included in the package.  We were
also using Multics, and had been given printed copies of a Multics new
user help document as well.

-- 
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods at acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods at avoncote.ca>
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