After dutifully training people to pronounce simctl correctly (“sim control”, not cuddle or kittle), I stopped by my binary folder (/bin, also pronounced “bin”, like the thing you throw stuff into) this morning to see how I pronounce all sorts of things. I’m curious as to how my pronunciations compare to yours.

Here is a list of how I say things from my highly unscientific survey of /bin:

• cat: Meow. Does anyone not say “cat”? (From “concatenate”)
• csh: See shell. See shell run. Run shell run. Who’s a good shell? Yes you are!
• df: Dee Eff or occasionally disk free. Mostly “Run df to see how much free disk there is” (notice the inversion from “disk free” to “free disk”).
• chmod, chown: Change mod but I mostly say “make it executable” or “add read permission”. I almost never say it out loud. Similarly, chown is just “change owner” because saying “change own” is just weird.
• cp, rm, mv: See Pee (no 30) or copy. Are Em or remove. And “move”. Don’t let anyone convince you it’s “mivv”.
• ls: Ell ess. I almost never say “list” but I do say “list the contents of the working directory with ell ess”.
• rmdir, mkdir: Arr emm dear or remove “dear”, and “make dear” (which, you know, is really sweet when you think about it.)
• pwd: I only ever say “print the working directory”.
• ln: Going against the trend, it’s always “ell enn”, not “link”. Probably because I never use this and always use lns instead.

I’m not sure this post has much of a point other than to amuse you by how I waste time in the morning before the caffeine kicks in. Let me know how wrong I am and what the correct pronunciation of some of these items are.