Comment by smoyer

11 years ago

Yes, the name is goofy at best, but I'm guessing it was a play on "man" pages. I would have thought a small format "man" page would be a "boy" page, but that still has the gender connotation.

If you think about what a short format "manual" page would be, perhaps a "pamphlet" (pamp?) or "brochure" (bro) makes sense (tongue in cheek at the moment).

I was also sad to learn that I needed Ruby on my computers (I don't generally add it since I'm not qualified to secure it ... nothing wrong with the language other than my ignorance of it).

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smoyer

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pbhjpbhj  11 years ago

I quite like "pam" [pamphlet] as an alternative - not the manual just a short pamphlet of examples ... or maybe just "ex" or "eg"?

[ex currently is linked to a mode of vim (which I never use) on my system; eg isn't used but the system tells me it's for easygit. "pam" says no command found but that there are 23 similar. I don't know what program provides the suggestions precisely something in the apt ecosystem I suspect]

  • smoyer  11 years ago

    I don't know of a pam command in *nix, but there are a ton of modules related to the "Pluggable Authentication Module" with pam in the name. When I say "pam" at work, everyone thinks "PAM".

    • dictum  11 years ago

      Pam is also often short for Pamela, which, if we're going to stick to no-gendered-anything-ever, is a gendered name.