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Say you want to talk about a piece of command-line software, like make or bash or the cp command. These commands are all lower-case, and case-sensitive (i.e. won't work on the computer if you capit...
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:20:55Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/23419 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
interfect
·
2019-12-08T05:20:55Z (almost 5 years ago)
Say you want to talk about a piece of command-line software, like `make` or `bash` or the `cp` command. These commands are all lower-case, and case-sensitive (i.e. won't work on the computer if you capitalize them), and also often double as the names of the software projects that write the programs that the commands invoke. What happens when you want to start a sentence with the name of one of these tools? Which of the following is best? - cat is a Unix utility for concatenating files. (Start a sentence with a lower-case letter, which looks weird.) - Cat is a Unix utility for concatenating files. (Capitalize the command name, which looks weird and won't run.) - `cat` is a Unix utility for concatenating files. (Start the sentence with one of these weird code box things. Requires that that formatting option be available, and you still end up leading with a lower-case letter.) - One Unix utility for concatenating files is cat. (Just write around the problem because you don't know what to do otherwise.) Do any style guides address this issue?
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2016-06-18T02:37:02Z (over 8 years ago)
Original score: 10