On a side note:
I hate it that the password-change command is minimally abbreviated to "passwd".
Come on, making it much more complicated to remember and saving just two freakin letters??
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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"umount" is worse
But the only command that I have to look up every damn time, although it has no abbreviation at all, is useradd.
Oh no, wait, I mean adduser!
... No, wait again... aah...
Next update changes it to usadder as a compromise. Supposedly, it's short for "user adder" but we all know it's to make "[you] sadder".
All the worse that Debian has both useradd and adduser. I never remember which is the one I want. And in Redhat-derivatives itβs something even more confusing.
The only thing I ever want to do is add a user to a group, is that too much to ask?
adduser is an interactive wrapper for useradd. It can, for example, prompt the user to set a password rather than execute passwd separately. Very useful if you just want to manage a user without reading through useradd's command line options, then running usermod because you forgot to set something.
It doesn't excuse the bad naming, I'd rather have something like useradd --interactive, but it's worth remembering.
You'd want usermod for that, no? If the user already exists and you're just modifying their groups?
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First time I have to use it, the spelling really confused me. Wrote unmount and didnβt understand why it didnβt work.
I guess this also must be an additional layer of hellfire for dyslexics...
I SAID, pass the wood
Itβs the passw daemon
π€· that's why we have ls, rm, mv and hell, even w.
To confuse things even more there's a utility called pwgen and I can never remember which two letters to type before hitting autocomplete.
mv = move, thus:
- rm = rome
- ls = lose
- cd = code
- w = woe
That is so cool.
So
- tr = tore
- tty = totey
- rsync = rosynce
- ps = pose
- pr = pore
- mpd = moped
I could do this all day.
making it much more complicated to remember
Do you not tab-complete your commands? I mean, my terminal usage for anything beyond very short commands consists of .
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isn't it just 'present working directory'?
No. βPrint working directoryβ is the command to print (display) the βcwdβ (current working directory).
It's 'print current directory' in the source code:
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/42c4578b49afaf3dc8de884262f34e4a19066860/src/pwd.c#L1
You "print" to standard output, which is the terminal.
Unless you're old-school and using a teletype as your terminal and actually printing it.
This is what it is at least in my head
In my head too. We can share though.
That's what I've always known it as
I mean itβs basically the same thing but the command itself means βprintβ; itβs a damn old command and it probably predates using screens for terminals (used to be printers); which is why all the parts of Linux (ugh, and GNU of course) that came from Unix ideas came from that age.
You literally sat in front of a typewriter that would respond to you. Wild.
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My kryptonite is du which reports disk usage, and df which reports disk file size, or no, wait, du is file size and df is disk usage.
Most of the time I can only remember whichever one I don't need at the moment and futilely hope that its man page will mention the other (which it doesn't).
I'm always like "du shows disk usage of files, and df shows how much of disk is free".
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pwned
Just make an alias with a more convenient name.
alias 'where_the_fuck_am_i'="pwd"
alias who_the_fuck_am_i='whoami'
alias what_the_hell_is_going_on='btop'
alias who_the_fuck_is_that=finger
alias finger_me='finger $USER'
What the hell is wrong with all of you? Command names obviously use - and not _
alias _='-'
alias too_late='echo π'
alias holy-shit-what-does-this-button-d-='rm -rf --no-preserve-root /'
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Unfortunately all the 2, 3 and 4 letter combinations are used as an alias for when i mistype "ls"
I thought it meant p-word. As in "wet ass p-word"
You are allowed to say pussy on the internet. Cats did nothing wrong.
"If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are."
- Lords and Ladies
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I usually abbreviate these "in German" in my head. Esp. handy if there's a freaking double-U in it, which is just one syllable in German. Exception: /etc = Etsy
Iβm still not over the fact that /etc isnβt for et cetera
EDIT: turns out that it is, and that thereβs a lot of dumbasses on the internet βteachingβ
You might be right.
I am German and never had a problem with pwd... The "double-you" certainly breaks some easy phonetic connections you would otherwise just make...
I always called it Present Working Directory but apparently it's Print
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