Path: csiph.com!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!panix!.POSTED.spitfire.i.gajendra.net!not-for-mail From: cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Don Norman: The Truth About Unix Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2026 16:39:07 -0000 (UTC) Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC Message-ID: <10llb7b$916$1@reader2.panix.com> References: <10lb6d7$3she5$1@dont-email.me> <10lfs3f$nn6$1@reader2.panix.com> Injection-Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2026 16:39:07 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: reader2.panix.com; posting-host="spitfire.i.gajendra.net:166.84.136.80"; logging-data="9254"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@panix.com" X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test77 (Sep 1, 2010) Originator: cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) Xref: csiph.com alt.folklore.computers:233832 In article , Niklas Karlsson wrote: >On 2026-01-29, Dan Cross wrote: >> >> Completion and abbreviation aren't exactly the same thing, and >> completion in the TOPS-20 sense is much more evolved than >> anything Unix has done. > >No indeed, they aren't the same thing. I was only trying to say that >it's the closest you'll typically get on a *nix system. > >I suppose one could write a shell that does support abbreviation. I >don't know of any such attempts (but would be very interested if they >did exist), and I could see it getting messy the way things work on >*nix. Abbreviations in the sense I understood them earlier in the thread were closer to shell aliases than what I gather you mean here, which is closer to the DEC (and IBM VM) thing of requiring the user to only type a few characters. One could write a shell that mimmicked the latter behavior, as you observed; it would simply walk $PATH, open directories, and keep look for programs that matched a prefix until it found something unambiguous. That's not quite how e.g. the VMS mechanism worked. On VMS, you could define "foreign commands" and specify how much of the prefix you considered significant; that overrode the need for non-ambiguity in the first four characters of the verb prefix. For instance, I have `bl*ank:==type/page nl:` to provide a quick way to clear the screen in my `LOGIN.COM` file. (I'm sure that Rich already knows, but the name is an homage to TOPS-20.) - Dan C.