Re: [Nmh-workers] mhshow flag: -combined ?

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Ken,

> > > perhaps -concat/-noconcat ?
> >
> >That's good, but why not -cat for catenate, where cat(1) gets its name.
> 
> Huh, I always thought that cat(1) was short for conCATenate

No, cat(1) is named after http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/catenate

    $ curl -sS http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/vol1/man1.bun |
    > sed -n '/\.TH CAT/,/^-cat /p'
    -.TH CAT 1
    -.SH NAME
    -cat \- catenate and print
    $

> (at least that's what the man page says).

Some palwtry GNU excuse for a man page referring you to info(1).  :-) I
wouldn't expect them to know their Unix history.

> I don't know if there was something called "con" back then.

There's wasn't.  There was no clash.  They just chose their words
carefully.  Similarly, tr(1) is transliterate, not translate.

> -concat makes sense to me.  -cat ... well, it doesn't make as much
> sense to me.

I'd expect nmh users to be Unix users familiar with cat(1).  I'd expect
it to make sense to them for that alone?

On the question of whether the option should be named so the default is
the -no-less version, I don't think that matters.  More important is a
negative term isn't sought out to make that true so a double-negative
results when -no is prefixed.

Cheers, Ralph.