From: wollman@sadye (Garrett Wollman)
Subject: Re: Pronouncing Unix names
Organization: University of Vermont, EMBA Computer Facility
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 01:09:02 GMT

In article <13821@mindlink.bc.ca> Charlie_Gibbs@mindlink.bc.ca (Charlie Gibbs) writes:
>     A while back there was a thread discussing how to pronounce
>".cshrc".

/tshsh'r:k/.

(A lot of people around here seem to call it `shell-rec', as if csh
were the only shell there was.  Mercifully, that is not the case.)

>I don't want to get back into that one (I use the Bourne
>shell myself :-).  But has anyone thought about other Unix names that
>are equally difficult to pronounce?

Well, .bashrc is much easier.  Hmmm, is it safe to talk about
sendmail.fc in polite company?  How about /dev/dsk/dks0c0d0?  Or
Net/2's trio, kvm_mkdb, dev_mkdb, and pwd_mkdb?

`passwd' isn't all that difficult to pronounce, but it sure confuses
the poor users who don't realize that the `or' was elided many years
ago....  That brings us to `chsh' (/tshsh/), `chfn', and `chpass'.

Actually, IBM is very fond of `ch' commands, and they usually come
paired with `ls' commands; thus, we have:

wollman@trantor(1)$ ch # I hit M-? here
charconv    checkeq     chgrp       chlicense   chown       chtz        
chart       checkmm     chgrpmem    chmod       chprtsv     chump       
chcolor     checkmm1    chhwkbd     chnamsv     chps        chvfs       
chcursor    checknr     chkbd       chnfs       chrctcp     chx25       
chdisp      chfn        chkey       chnfsexp    chsh        chypdom     
checkalias  chfont      chkeymap    chnfsmnt    chsound     
checkcw     chfs        chlang      chnumvt     chtest      

>     Like /usr, for instance.  I don't feel really comfortable
>pronouncing it "user" because there might actually be a directory
>somewhere by that name.

Naw... I don't think that anyone in their right mind would ever create
a directory called `user' intentionally... There are sometimes `users'
(note the `s'), but never `user'.  This is, of course, another fine
point that makes things all the more difficult when trying to explain
these things to a Civil Engineering undergrad who just got his first
``Unix account'' (as they are wont to call them)...

>  An instructor in a course I recently took
>pronounced it with a short "u" sound, as in "us".  Or as in Edgar
>Allan Poe's "Fall of the House of /usr".

I don't know about anyone else, but when a directory is in the root, I
usually say the slash.  Thus, `/usr' is `slash user', but
`/usr/bin/df' is `user bin dee eff'.

>     Another vexing one is /etc.  "Et cetera" is too unwieldy.  But
>I've heard it pronounced "et-see".  Cute but effective.

Well, don't put files there!  On Net/2, we've got /sbin, /usr/sbin,
/usr/libexec, and probably others; there are no executable files in
/etc at all, and many of the data files which used to be there are
gone too.

>$ cat >/etc/etc/etc/etc/ftang/zoopboing/zowie

This sounds like a job for B. Clifford Neuman.

-GAWollman

-- 
   Garrett A. Wollman  = wollman@emba.uvm.edu = UVM is welcome to my opinions
                       =    uvm-gen!wollman   =
   That's what being alive is all about.  No deity, no higher goal
   exists, than to bring joy to another person.    - Elf Sternberg
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers