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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?"
Considering none of the other standard directories are acronyms, I'd have to call bulltish on this one. :)
It's et cetera. If you look at the Unix hierarchy, you get:
It's not about configuration files, either. /etc is home to both configuration and system-essential files, such as passwd and motd. I wouldn't call passwd "configuration," and I wouldn't call it "data." It's more "control." But that doesn't matter - the stuff in /etc just wouldn't fit anywhere else. All the backronyms in the world won't change that.
The people who made up these file systems are not the pointy haired middle management type, they are geeks like me and you. They don't have acronyms for everything. /etc isn't going to stand for something like "extendable tool configuration", it is either going to stand for et cetera or nothing at all. People who want to sound cool by saying things like, "SQL stands for Structured Query Language" are just trying to "sound smart" in front of their "friends". That's my philosophy after looking at your explanation of the UNIX hierarchy.
Sig: I stole this sig.
...as opposed to the non-editable, non-text configuration files that Unix systems are famous for?
These are the people who named the editor "ed". Don't overthink it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'm even older. I've been doing UNIX since v5 in about 1974. And /etc means et cetera. I wasn't even aware people were back-forming revisionist interpretations. How odd.
This is the sort of thing that makes me distrust historical interpretation of stuff that actually matters.