shunt.io what does it mean? what made me decide on the name?

When trying to decide on a name for this service I decided on three things it should be….

Relevant – No point it being totally unrelated

Memorable – When someone thinks about transferring a file it needs to be associated with memorable word/s

Short – UploadFilesFromTheCommandLine.com just isn’t going to work

I went throught the usual words, upload, send, transfer, etc and as expected all the top TLDS had been taken. I then began to consider other words that meant moving something from one place to another and thanks to my train anorak days I quickly came up with “shunt”. Again all the top tlds were taken but then I remembered the .io extension which is popular with tech start-ups and websites. A quick search showed shunt.io was available for registration so I quickly snapped it up. The added advantage of this tld is that IO is an abbreviations for input/output which makes it a perfect fit for this service.

noun

noun: shunt; plural noun: shunts

an act of pushing or shoving something.

shunt verb (MOVE)

to move someone or something from one place to another

So this new project of mine centres on the ability to be able to easily upload files from the command line. WHY? As a daily linux user I find it frustrating that in order to share files I with have to open a browser, type a url, click upload which is fine for a local system but for a remote headless system it’s just not viable.

Another issue is that some file hosters require special software to be installed in order to upload. After working with may different linux/unix flavours as well as routers os’s like openwrt and busybox all of which come with a basic set of software tools I found curl to be the most common in base installs hence the reason shunt.io is based around it.