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Comment by adiM | Hacker News Reader

> Don't start your command name with the letter g even though it's a perfectly fine letter situated right in the center of the keyboard. All past and future g commands are the personal property of Richard Stallman, who in 1983 was granted an exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide license to the entire g namespace. Although he grudgingly granted exceptions for git and go, if you're not Linus Torvalds or Google, don't bother hitting him up.

What?

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GNU software names tend to have the letter G somewhere. It also shows up in GNU libraries such as GTK and glibc. They export namespaced symbols such as g_printf.

It's just like POSIX's _t suffix. It's "reserved" but in practice nobody cares.

The author is making a joke about ‘gnu’.

As, indeed, is noted below:

> The previous bullet point was a joke.

Ah, missed that. Thanks

I guess it won't hurt to explain the joke.

The Mac has what is sometimes called a "BSD userland" with the result that cp, rm, ls, grep, etc work basically like they do on FreeBSD. But some Mac users prefer the GNU versions of those commands. To avoid breaking scripts that depend on the BSD behavior, when Homebrew installs the GNU versions, it names them gcp, grm, gls, ggrep, etc.

You used to be able to chose the prefix, until Homebrew removed build options.

(You still can on the BSDs.)

Not just macOS. At my first full-time job, I was introduced to Solaris. I had been using Linux for years, and been using GNU utilities for even longer (through EMX, which is like Cygwin but for OS/2). And the lack of options I was used to from the GNU versions infuriated me. They told me, "just put a g in front". Although it wasn't a standard part of Solaris install, the sysadmin had installed several of the GNU utilities (from sunfreeware.com) and they were present with that prefix.

This custom, of installing GNU utilities with a g-prefix, isn't just on macOS and Solaris, but also on other UNIX flavours as well.

Look up the gnuplot name controversy to better understand what's happening here.

That's a little unfair, that explicitly says "GNU" in the name. And it's not GNU, or even GPL. That's rather more egregious than simply beginning with 'g'.

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