Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Editable Text Configuration
Respect the laws of physics, for the laws of physics have no respect for you.
http://burks.brighton.ac.uk/burks/linux/rute/node1 7.htm quotes it as etcetera configuration files. others who are quoting it as an acronym may also double as alternative logical viewpoints, however, all unix configuration files are 99% of the time plain text files by default. that's just the way it is.
/usr, generally i see it as abbreviation for "user customised files", reason being that /bin is obviously going to be very similar on all unix-like systems. /usr/bin is generally used for customised install files, things that are created after install.
/use/home layout, yuck!
reading too much into the naming can be dangerous. consider
but what about reading this name as "/user files", which then creates the awful
Why UNIX?
Why would /etc be an acronym when every other directory off root is an abreviation? /bin - binaries /boot - bootstrap files /dev - devices /home - user home directories /lib - libraries /mnt - temporary mounts /proc - processes /sbin - static binaries /tmp - temporary files /usr - user programs (not boot critical) /var - variable data
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
In which, ironically, it is pronounced "et ketera" (stress on the "ke" and remember to roll the r). English has done really weird things to the pronounciation of Latin.
Chris Mattern
No, but they did write millions of lines of poetry, much of it with strict forms. If you read a million lines of C with lots of good comments, you'd figure out the syntax before you finished.
No, but they did write millions of lines of poetry, much of it with strict forms. If you read a million lines of C with lots of good comments, you'd figure out the syntax before you finished.
/etc original meant than how et cetera was originally intended pronounced.
And yet we still do not know how they pronounced them because they wrote down their language they did not speak it into a dictaphone. Et cetera is pronounced as the English-speaking world has decided, not Latin pronunciation guessers.
Put a little differently, we are much more likely to know what
Remembering what the hell I was doing in my young'uns pants 25 years ago is hard enough. Trying to remember if I heard a bit of useless trivia that I've never really thought about since, not gonna happen. The way to pronounce something, on the other hand, is reinforced through the years.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I suspect that if you checked an older version like Solaris 5.6 (or 6 or 2.6 or whatever the fuck they called that version), you'd find that init is actually located in etc and it's sbin that has the symlink. Historically, Unix has put a lot of binaries in /etc, which certainly lends support to the "et cetera" explanation.
Oh, I'm sorry.
/usr/sbin on HPUX. There is a symlink to it in /etc, but that's not where the binary lives.
/usr/sbin/ping /usr/sbin/ping /etc/ping /etc/ping -> /usr/sbin/ping
/sbin/init.d (as well as /sbin/rc0.d->rc6.d) which makes sense. They're executables, for the super-user, which belong in /sbin.
:)
the ping binary is in
Try again sometime.
root@mrsparkle# ls -l
-r-sr-xr-x 1 root bin 49152 Oct 18 15:54
root@mrsparkle# ls -l
lr-sr-xr-t 1 root sys 14 Mar 14 2006
HPUX is actually much LESS retarded than most in a lot of ways. They actually moved the init startup scripts to
It makes more logical sense. It's just 'different' than most Unices.
(and if you've ever used the Software Distributor, you know what real package management is like.... RPM, pkgadd and the ilk can go scratch. swinstall is where it's at!
As far as I recall, I used to call it et cetera too, but then I was corrected/flamed once, and was basically told that etc stands for, "everything configurable".
I am at loss with words...
> And yet we still do not know how they pronounced them because they wrote down their language
> they did not speak it into a dictaphone. Et cetera is pronounced as the English-speaking world has decided,
> not Latin pronunciation guessers.
A lot of that pronunciation knowledge comes from how Latin works were translated into Greek. They used kappa to represent 'C' in transliterated Latin words.
- MFN
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
et cetera makes sense as its not just configuration, you have init, password and "various" other stuff found there. etc.. etc..
/etc is much less confusing ok."
A better questions is.. why does Windows Vista (the most advanced OS on planet earth per Steve and Bill) use alphabet device names in 2007?
I can hear computer novices saying..
Novice: "Why is my primary drive C and not A?"
Master: "A and B are reserved for floppy drives."
Novice: "What's a floppy drive?"
Master: ".. Something we don't use anymore."
Novice: "Why are they still reserved then?"
Master: "They just are."
Novice: "Why isn't A the primary and C or Z reserved?"
Master: "... just use Unix, explaining
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
As support, I ask how you pronounce "etc" when you read it in a book, magazine, etc...? How were you taught to pronounce it in your English class (apparently, so many years ago)?
Ya, I thought so. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
We always pronounced it "slash et cee" since all your other recommendations are too damn long.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Actually there are no .'s or ..'s in the file system. These little gems only denote relative directories and are never actually part of the file system
Honest question based on your statement...Why then do . and .. affect the reference counts on hard links?
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
Actually, I almost always use "&c." as the shortened form of et cetera. That is because the ampersand (&) is actually a stylized glyph of the Latin word et 'and'. Also, in lists, "&c." is always preceded by a comma, even if you normally omit the "Oxford comma". (E.g.: one, two and three; one, two, three and others; but, one, two, three, &c..)
There is no true advantage to this, but it is merely a stylistic choice. It's also about adhering to proper standards, such as italicizing non-English words in texts when they appear, such as trompe l'oeil 'trick/deceive the eye' (literally) or et cetera (&c.), in this example.
That was his point. If '..' is a virtual directory and not an actual entry in the directory, then why does it affect the hardlink count of the directory it points to?