Maja changed the topic of ##bash-crimes to: we bash back | club of folks preoccupied in whether they could, not whether they should | logs https://libera.irclog.whitequark.org/~h~bash-crimes
<Maja> isabella: huh, interesting
<isabella> After more exploration I found out that Fortran 77 (available in the same bsd repo) also called what is now known as file descriptors "units"
<isabella> And David Korn was a maths guy who wrote and published a bunch of Fortran code
<isabella> https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/blob/master/usr.bin/f77/libI77/fiodefs.h in this case a unit is a struct that wraps FILE* and adds some metadata. There's a global array of units, and Fortran functions like WRITE take a number which is an index in that array
<isabella> Fun fact: 0 = stderr, 5 = stdin, 6 = stdout
<isabella> And the manual talks about logical units, so these are something akin to the modern LUNs in linux
<isabella> And they are logical because the physical ones are... tape units
<isabella> >Input/output is done directly by referencing a file or device by its name (FDname) or indirectly by referencing a logical I/O unit (SCARDS or INPUT, SPRINT or PRINT, SPUNCH or OBJECT, GUSER, SERCOM, 0 to 99). FDnames are assigned to logical I/O units using keywords in the command language or by default.
<isabella> So tldr: -u was picked by someone who started programming before UNIX existed and when things that we now call file descriptors were widely known as units
<isabella> Relics from like 60 years ago
<jetchisel> Ancient relics of ze past!
<jetchisel> Or it was created/picked by the same folks who wrote Unix.
<jetchisel> s/wrote/created
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