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Define - /etc?
ogar572 asks: "There has been an ongoing and heated debate around the office concerning the definition of what /etc means on *nix operating systems. One side says "et cetera" per Wikipedia. Another side says it means 'extended tool chest' per this gnome mailing list entry or per this Norwegian article. Yet another side says neither, but he doesn't remember exactly what he heard in the past. All he remembers is that he was flamed when he called it 'et cetera', but that 'extended tool chest' didn't sound right either. So, what does it really mean?"
Long time UNIX hacks---and by that I mean UNIX guys from the early-1980s---pronounce /etc as "slash ett cee"; to me that makes it clear that /etc's origins are as "et cetera".
"/var" didn't exist until long after "/etc" was created; so, you can't look to /var's use to provide a clue to /etc's origins.
20 years ago, there was nothing to settle. It was et cetera. It was named that because of what it was used for. The configuration files for other things that live elsewhere. It provided a short reference to those files. Also notice how we did not like to type back then. Before that time, you were typing on what amounted to a glorified printer with a keyboard, so every char you did not have to type was great. One central location for binaries with a 3 letter name. Everyone knew where everything was. I'd get flamed if I said it was better than it is now, but it really was more elegant.
/etc. It all followed logic back then. Anyone loading tools in /etc would have been the one getting flamed for not knowing how to organize a system.
Extended tool chest? Yeah, name tools that go in
Ok, now I really do feel old because it was more than 20 years ago. Sad because I was smart enough to answer this and not smart enough to make millions when the industry took off. I'm also too stupid to understand flame wars. If you like your system a different way, do it. If you think I should do mine different, pound sand.
The correct pronunciation is "et setera", since it is taken directly from Latin. It's also not uncommon to see it abbreviated as &c. This is because the ampersand is actually a highly stylized glyph representing the Latin "et".
As for the 'ask slashdot' question, I've always viewed it as being et cetera, a place for all the other stuff...
This guy's the limit!
IIRC, some other systems (SunOS?) used to put binaries in there, which never made sense to me
Oh Jesus, get off your high horse you elitist prick.
I'm pretty sure it is "et etera". I've been mucking with Unix since Unix V7 (1980), and I've never heard of "extended tool chest". It doesn't really make sense because you don't put any tools there. If there were any "tools" to be put in an "extended chest", they'd have gone in "/usr/local" back in the day. That was before the practice of having an "/opt" directory evovled.
:"/etc". Over the years it became clear that "/etc" was very important, and "/usr" was too cluttered, etc., and thus we have the evolution of the modern Unix file hierarchy.
I always assumed that configuration stuff got shoved in etc because it wasn't a program (that would go in "/bin") it wasn't a library ("/lib") and it wasn't some sort of user data ("/usr" -- this was before "/home"). It was something else, so it went in a place set aside for miscellany
The hierarchy may include historical obscurities such as "/etc", but it is remarkably well thought out. It shows the wisdom of abstracting the file system from storage devices. "/etc" also eliminates, or at least reduces the argument for, a system wide registry file such as Windows has, which has turned out to cause as many problems as it solves.
But it is undoubtedly a bit obscure to the newcomer's eye.
I remember the 1980s when the microcomputer transformed business. In the mid 1980s, most people who worked in computers had been weaned on, or least familiarized, with some form of Unix. When I started my job at one place around 1986, my predecessor had arranged everybody's file systems so their applications were stored in folder under a "bin" folder at the root (this was a Mac shop). By 1990, I was hiring people who had only used personal computers and had never used Unix. One of those people extended the "bin" traditoin by naming the application folder "Bin of Applications" -- as if "bin" referred to an open box, rather than "binary". It gave me a chuckle. "Bin of Applications" carried the idea to the user much better than "bin", and posed no particular inconvenience on a system where you never have to type path names.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm replying to you because you were more polite than the sibling. Just because the word "cetera" is Latin does not mean that it is pronounced with an S sound. In fact, in Latin, it would never have been pronounced that way. In the days of Caesar, it would have been pronounced with a K sound and, as the Latin language evolved into ecclesiastical Latin, it would be pronounced with a CH sound.
The pronunciation with an S sound comes from the way that Latin words have usually been anglicized. Most often, the letters are pronounced as in English but the syllables are accented as in the original Latin.
/root/your.mum Managed to figure out that you were Australian before I even saw your login name. Hint: 99.9% of people without corks on their hats won't understand what "root" means in Ozzie slang, though now that I've brought it up they can probably guessOriginally, /usr was an abbreviation of "user", it was where you put home directories. /usr/ken was Ken Thomson's home directory, and /usr/dmr was Dennis Richie's home directory.
/usr.
(These are the guys that invented Unix.)
Then people started making home directories named after software packages. After a while, these names became standardized, and it became necessary to put home directories in some other location than
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
Actually, thats 1 year 10 months.
It does. Originally it contained configuration files, start-up scripts, and system management tools needed at boot. As time has gone on, most of the second group are in subdirectories of /etc, and the latter group was moved to /sbin. Amiga users will probably note that the "S" directory had similar problems in AmigaOS 1.x, and was similarly broken up on AmigaOS 2.x.
Historically, Unix had /sys for the kernel (short for SYStem, duh), /usr for user areas (yes, user areas), /lib for system libraries, /bin for top-level binaries, and /etc as the miscellaneous area. As time went on, substantial amounts of the operating system went into /usr, with the "bin" account set up to contain most of the tools people needed (which is why bin is also in /etc, and owns substantial amounts of the operating system, despite the apparent lack of a need to have that. It's legacy practices.)
So some time in the mid to late eighties, much of this started to be moved around. Real home directories were moved out of /usr to a variety of directories, eventually standardising, Mac OS X aside, on /home. /usr itself started to be reorganized to look something like the top level, /etc was cleaned out (though much of this happened in the mid-nineties), and we have what we see today.
Meanwhile, people trying to be "clever" have invented new names for all these areas. I've heard people claim that USR stands for "Unix System Resources", which opens the question of why all the system directories don't begin with "US"? We see the nonsense above about ETC meaning something other than, well, etc, and other silly explanations doubtless exist for BIN and VAR.
The names mean what they sound like they mean. If it doesn't sound like a directory has a name that fits its current use, it's usually because it wasn't intended for that use originally.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
precisely. UnixWare did this as well.
/etc/conf/bin
also idtune, the kernel param config util is in
but Kaiser and Caesar mean two very different things in the food world. ask for it one way and you get bread, (or health insurance++) and the other gets you salad. huh?!
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
/sbin and /usr/sbin are for binaries used by the super-user (root, rather than normal users) - they aren't statically linked.
/sbin was for statically linked binaries. The idea being that these were critical tools that could be used even if only the root file system was mounted.
Yeah, that's how it seems to be used today. But back in the dark ages
Going back to SVR2, /etc, /lib, and /bin contained files that were needed in single-user mode, when /usr was unmounted (e.g., during boots & backups). It was not uncommon for multi-user mode only configuration files to reside somewhere in /usr (cron & UUCP come to mind).
i believe you are looking for this. i still haven't bothered to try it out though. i hate being a poor geek
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
don't wanna hijack FP, and i'm sure it's mentioned below, but what it really means is:
/etc' rule? Well if it's only editable text configurations that's allowed there, makes sense then don't it.
Editable Text Configuration
I belive i got it from the FHS pdf ages ago, and since I also asume et cetra for ages, this came as a suprise, but it does make sense if you think about it. Remember the 'no binaries in
We don't, but historical linguistics is like any other science - we can try to find the theories that best explain the available evidence, and refine those over time as new ideas are developed.No, but they did many other useful things, like transliterate words between languages and scripts; e.g. writing Latin names in the Greek alphabet and vice versa, or writing Celtic and Germanic names in the Latin alphabet. This doesn't tell us much about the actual sounds the alphabets represented, but it tells us about their relationships, and reduces the number of plausible solutions for ancient pronunciation.
For a simple example, "Caesar" was regularly written in Greek as the equivalent of "kaisar", not as "saisar" or "saizar". The fact that different Greek letters were chosen to represent the different Latin letters implies that they represented different sounds. From considering all the other evidence, we find that the solution that is most consistent with the observed facts is the one that has Greek kappa and Latin C pronounced like an English K; therefore we conclude that "Caesar" was pronounced with a "k" sound, and it also seems reasonable to assume that "caetera" was consistent with that.
Using an ellipses after "etc" is redundant. Just use "etc." ...
It may mean that now (and /usr = Unix System Resources, yeah right)
/etc. And configuration files also used to live in places like the root directory, or /var. /usr or even /lib, sometimes in ./conf/ subdirs.
/usr really did mean 'users', as in, resources for users not administrators. Well at one point it also held home directories before that was split off into home.
But if you remember, programs like mount and user databases (when passwd files got too long to scan) were thrown into
So it really did mean etcetra. And
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
That's not an accident or a quirk-- SQL was really spelled 'SEQUEL' at first.
Folks interested in the history of C and Unix will find many interesting documents at Dennis's web page (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/index.html).
Also interesting are a number of old articles:
Volume 17 , Issue 7, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nieh/teaching/e6118_s
But I couldn't find anything on the meaning of
Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, chapter 2.6 -- "The Directory Hierarchy":
/etc/getty, which initializes a terminal connection for /bin/login. /etc/rc is a file of shell commands that is executed after the system is bootstrapped. /etc/group list the members of each group."
/etc, so that's the best I could do from my own bookshelf.
"/etc (et cetera) we have also seen before. It contains various administrative files such as the password file and some systems programs such as
I looked through Ritchie and Thompson's "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" and found no mention of
And what about Unix System Resources ?
Where we find...
An interesting tidbit is the list of files installed into the boot disk from tape on a virgin UNIX system:
According to Dr. Peter H. Salus, it means et cetera.
According to Dr. Salus, "Editable Text Configuration" is alien to the thinking of the creators.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
* c always hard:
This is fairly well established. The Romans were highly literate and were quite capable of describing the sounds their letters made. It's not like trying to guess what color dinosaurs' skins were. We know the Latin 'C' made a
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Yes, "editable text configuration" is a backronym.
And, as another user pointed out "editable text configurations" is a stupid name too, because if it's text, it's evidently editable. So why not just "text configurations" then? Also, in early Unix, everything was editable (remember, in Unix, everything is a file), so that's superfluous too. And, lastly, it was the repository for a lot of things that weren't configurations, including binaries.
Again, this is a backronym, and not even a clever one.
Regards,
--
*Art
The UNIX Programming Environment written by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike of Bell Labs, published in 1984 by Prentice Hall defines /etc as et cetera on page 63. IMO this is the single best Unix book ever wriiten to learn Unix.
Actually, "." and ".." are part of the filesystem (i.e. they're stored on disk, as directory entries) in the FAT filesystem.
Assuming that all filesystems are implemented 100 % similar to the one(s) you know about _is_ noob and pretentious: the implementer of the FS is free to do things the way he sees fit as long as it provides reasonable semantics.
In fact he doesn't have to do directories or files at all - he may implement everything as a big hash with different entries sharing the same blocks.
I've never questioned that /etc means "et caetera". In Spanish we are used to call it "e te ce". And, if you find it interesting, "etc" is the usual way to abreviate "ecétera" in Spanish, Catalan and other latin-descendant languages.
When I was introduced to Unix at Bell Labs in 1980 (cbunix 2.3) - it was pronounced "etcetera" (as in "etcetera password file"). If it was turned into a acronym, that was after the fact.
[Insert pithy quote here]