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?"
It means etc...
Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark.
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".
Enormous Trove of Configuration files, that's what it is.
Considering none of the other standard directories are acronyms, I'd have to call bulltish on this one. :)
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.
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.
"/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.
/etc is exactly three months older than /var. Amazing!!
server / # ls -lah
total 72K
drwxr-xr-x 47 root root 4.0K Feb 11 10:23 etc
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4.0K May 11 2005 var
Wow, you're right.
adventure-today.com
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.
Originally, /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.
'linked-in binaries'. Here's some of the other TLAs: /lib: linked-in binaries /etc: extended tool chest /usr: unix system routines /bin: basic instructions (native) /var: volatile access region /opt: one per terminal /tmp: this maybe purged /mnt: multiple network things /dev: dont ever violate /sys: she's your sister
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.
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
Shit.
emacs - Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.
gdb - Get Down Baby.
gcc - Give Communism (a) Chance.
linux - Linus Is Not Usually Xeroflulogitic.
lisp - Lisp Is (for) Symbolic Programming.
java - Just Another Variant (of) Ada.
perl - Perl Essentially Resembles Lisp.
printf - People Rarely Insist (on) Naming This Function.
sed - Slashdot (is) Easily Duped.
top - Totally Ongoing Programs.
vi - Very Irritating.
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
because when the system looks for the top-level directory, it would have to iterate through more directories to get a match. Duh. People think that just because 'cd /etc/init.d/' and 'cd /usr/local/include/emacs/emacs2.1/site-lisp/' take the same amount of time after you hit enter then they both must be a single processor instruction or something. In fact, the computer is doing millions of calculations more for the second command, while you sit there picking your nose. That's why I only put one file or subdirectory per directory, so it's simpler for the computer to find it. If a program installs differently, I rewrite it. Since my computer doesn't have to work as hard, it lasts longer. If I did things your way, I might as well pound my motherboard with a shovel. You fucking prick, you disgust me. If someone I knew were putting too many entries directly under root, I'd smash their face with my fist. Asshole.