A timeline of Unix commands

i recently had occasion to mention my experience of someone assuming that any command ending in ‘-d’ is a systemd thing[a]. It made me wonder when Unix first started using that suffix for daemons: 6th Edition Unix introduced ‘cron’ rather than ‘crond’. i asked on the TUHS (Unix Heritage Society)[b] mailing list, and it turns out that 2nd Edition had ‘dpd’, ‘data-phone daemon’.

This inspired me to put together a basic timeline of when certain commands appeared in Unix.

Unix command timeline

It's not at all intended to be an exhaustive list, just a selection of commands of interest to me. But maybe the list will be of interest to others as well. :-)

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Glossary

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[a] Cf. footnote ‘a’ of this post:

“s6/66 for init, service supervision and service management”

[b] The Unix Heritage Society