The Free World: I’d Like to Buy a Consonant, Alex.
It’s widely recognized that *nix operating systems have more than their share of cryptic, and possibly stupid, commands. This entry is dedicated to the one that has stumped me since day one.
If I want to mount a drive in GNU/Linux, I can do so by using the command mount. Quixotically, if I want to unmount said drive, I cannot use the command unmount. Rather I have to use the command umount.
Where the hell is the n?
It can’t be a length thing like the 8.3 filenames forced on us back in the bad old DOS days, so what gives? I have no doubt that there’s some arcane and deeply technical reason why the command is missing its ‘n’, but for the moment I am mystified as to why someone would go to all the trouble to make a 6 letter command and not bother to take the extra nano second to include the seventh to make it a proper word.
I can live with most of the two-letter cryptic commands because most of them were designed by developers. Developers who don’t want to type any more letters than possible. But umount?
Puzzled…
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