Today I learned that the Debian project has a quite extensive list about binary names and their origin. For example the name bc, while being nowadays being completely rewritten by the GNU project, still stands for basic calculator, Perl standing for Practical Extraction and Report Language, which, if you ever worked with it, makes a lot of sense, or gross, a mail server taking care of greylisting, standing for “graylisting of suspicious sources”¹.² There are a ton of fun examples on this list, which often end up being programs I’ve never seen or used by seem rather interesting on closer inspection.

I came across that while surfing on the internet, most likely a toot on Mastodon, but I no longer know from which one. Leading to another lesson learned, write down links…, anyway.