Re: make mrproper

[James Lewis Nance]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 05:33:02PM +0000, [e-mail] wrote:
> Long ago, about January 24, Joseph wrote:
> > >From John Levon on Wednesday, 24 January, 2001:
> > >Idle curiosity, but what does the "mr" in make mrproper
> > >stand for ?
> > 
> > My guess is that it is a joke.  'Meister Proper' is the German 
> >   Mister Clean (the big, bald guy on the same-name cleaning 
> >   agent bottle).  I'm not sure of the spelling, though.  It's been 
> >   a while since I've seen the commercials.
> > I dunno if it's Finnish, though.  Never been there.  Maybe it was
> >   put in by a German developer.  Maybe not.  It was there when
> >   I started.
> 
> Hmm; I always thought it stood for m(ake the)r(emake) proper
> ie, recompile properly if something got messed up.
> 
> But I like the Mister Clean better :)

I saw a post from Linus once about this.  It is Finnish for "Mr. Clean".

Jim