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?"

Its pronounciation gives us a clue

[crath]

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".

Re:I vote for et cetera

[crath]

"/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.

Wow, I feel old

[Spackler]

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.

Extended tool chest? Yeah, name tools that go in /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.

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.

Re:Pronunciation?

[gEvil (beta)]

The correct pronunciation is "et setera", since it is taken directly from Latin. [wikipedia.org] 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". [wikipedia.org]

As for the 'ask slashdot' question, I've always viewed it as being et cetera, a place for all the other stuff...

Useless question

[slamb]

Why it was called that is at best a trivia question. A more directly useful question is what it should be used for. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard version 2.3 [pathname.com] (primarily used by Linux people, I think) says this:

The /etc hierarchy contains configuration files. A "configuration file" is a local file used to control the operation of a program; it must be static and cannot be an executable binary. [4]

IIRC, some other systems (SunOS?) used to put binaries in there, which never made sense to me

Re:Bullshit!

[RoutedToNull]

Oh Jesus, get off your high horse you elitist prick.

Backward etymology

[hey!]

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.

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 :"/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.

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.

Re:Pronunciation?

[ari_j]

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.

Re:I vote for et cetera

[Anonymous Coward]

/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 guess :-/

Re:Wow, I feel old

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I've been using UNIX since 1985 and it was *always* just "slash-et-cee" and meant etcetra. The whole "Extended tool chest" is just a silly Backronym [wikipedia.org]. However...

However...

> Yeah, name tools that go in /etc.

Actually prior to the creation of /sbin it actually was common for system binaries (like init, mkfs, mount, ...) to be placed in /etc. Eventually people realized that using a single directory for both configuration files and binaries was disgusting and /sbin came into being. By the mid 90's most modern UNIX variants had moved all the binaries to /sbin. Some OSes still provide symlinks for compatibity though: try a "ls -l /etc | grep sbin" on a Solaris machine some time.

origin of /usr

[dmoen]

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.
(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 /usr.

Doug Moen

Re:I vote for et cetera

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, thats 1 year 10 months.

Re:Wow, I feel old

[Coeurderoy]

So do I, ;-), I remember very well my first contact with Unix in the summer of 81 at UCB.
"Ok, you create files in your home directory, you will find the commands in bin or usr bin, .... and if you're curious you can look at the /etcetra directory, that is the place where all the rest of "usefull stuff" goes, mostly initialisation files and some shared configuration".

Well now of course I know the people there lied to me it really means "extraterrestrial creative tormentators", and proves that the aliens are dislexics.

Cheers: and don't worry there is still some blood left in us old *IX farts.
Did you notice that even the "coolest youngsters" do not dare to have something like the '85 Usenix "Sex, Drugs and Unix" Badge ?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:/etc has not always been just configuration fil

[funkfactorus]

precisely. UnixWare did this as well.

also idtune, the kernel param config util is in /etc/conf/bin

Re:Pronunciation?

[Hes Nikke]

"Caesar" should sound more like "Kaiser" than "seize her".

but Kaiser and Caesar mean two very different things in the food world. ask for it one way and you get bread [wikipedia.org], (or health insurance++ [wikipedia.org]) and the other gets you salad [wikipedia.org]. huh?!

Re:Not an acronym

[technothrasher]

/sbin and /usr/sbin are for binaries used by the super-user (root, rather than normal users) - they aren't statically linked.
 
Yeah, that's how it seems to be used today. But back in the dark ages /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.

Re:I've always assumed et-cetera

[e9th]

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).

Re:Bah,

[Hes Nikke]

isn't there a distro that does something like this already?

i believe you are looking for this [gobolinux.org]. i still haven't bothered to try it out though. i hate being a poor geek :(

Re:It means

[Anonymous Coward]

don't wanna hijack FP, and i'm sure it's mentioned below, but what it really means is:

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 /etc' rule? Well if it's only editable text configurations that's allowed there, makes sense then don't it.

Re:Pronunciation?

[Haeleth]

how do we know how anything was pronounced in the ancient world?

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.

Did the Romans produce a Latin dictionary with IPA transliterations for each word?

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.

Re:Wow, I feel old

[terjetrane]

The manual from 1971 on http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/1stEdman.htm l [bell-labs.com] shows that several programs, among them assembler (The B Assembler), compilator and libraries etc. (pun not intended) were in /etc.

Interesting comment about boot:

NAME boot -- reboot system

SYNOPSIS /etc/boot

DESCRIPTION boot logically a command, and is kept in /etc only to lessen
the probability of its being invoked by accident or from
curiosity. It reboots the system by jumping to the read--only
memory, which contains a disk boot program. ...and similar for mkfs:

This program is kept in /etc to avoid inadvertant use and
consequent destruction of information.

Re:It means

[SpankR]

Using an ellipses after "etc" is redundant. Just use "etc." ...

Backronym.

[Ayanami Rei]

It may mean that now (and /usr = Unix System Resources, yeah right)

But if you remember, programs like mount and user databases (when passwd files got too long to scan) were thrown into /etc. And configuration files also used to live in places like the root directory, or /var. /usr or even /lib, sometimes in ./conf/ subdirs.

So it really did mean etcetra. And /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.

Re:Pronunciation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same reason people transliterate Ess-Que-Ell into "Sequel"...It's quicker, and it sounds better.

That's not an accident or a quirk-- SQL was really spelled 'SEQUEL' [wikipedia.org] at first.

/usr/bin

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember reading, a loooooooong time ago, that frequently accessed binaries and binaries needed at boot time were stored in /bin. Other binaries were in /usr/bin. Dennis Ritchie's Unix Notes from 1972 (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/notes.html [bell-labs.com]) somewhat supports this memory by stating, "there is a directory '/usr' which contains all user's directories, and which is stored on a relatively large, but slow moving head disk, while the othe files are on the fast but small fixed-head disk."

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 [bell-labs.com]).

Also interesting are a number of old articles:

• "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System*", AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal 63 No. 6 Part 2, October 1984, pp. 1577-93., http://web.archive.org/web/19991013115731/cm.bell- labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html [archive.org] by Dennis M. Ritchie
  
• "UNIX Implementation", The Bell System Technical Journal, 1978, http://www.hughes-fl.com/books/pdf/UNIX_Implementa tion.pdf [hughes-fl.com] by K. Thompson
  
• "The UNIX time-sharing system", Communications of the ACM archive
  Volume 17 , Issue 7, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nieh/teaching/e6118_s0 0/papers/ritchie_unix74.pdf [columbia.edu] by D. M. Ritchie and K. Thompson
  

But I couldn't find anything on the meaning of /etc ;-)

From "The UNIX Programming Environment"

[eGabriel]

Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, chapter 2.6 -- "The Directory Hierarchy":

    "/etc (et cetera) we have also seen before. It contains various administrative files such as the password file and some systems programs such as /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."

I looked through Ritchie and Thompson's "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" and found no mention of /etc, so that's the best I could do from my own bookshelf.

Re:Backronym.

[hutchike]

In Solaris, /usr does hold home directories in /usr/home from memory, so you're right on the money. I'm with you on "etc" meaning et cetera. I've always been a fan of Occam's Razor.

Re:Extended Tool Chest?

[mickwd]

And what about Unix System Resources ?

It sure ain't "text" anything.

[argent]

Now I haven't personally used anything earlier than 5th Edition, but I can't recall anyone seriously referring to /etc as anything but "etcetera" or "ee tee see", but just to be sure that it didn't start out as an acronym I checked the First Edition manual, and found section 7 full of programs in /etc, including good old /etc/init, as well as the Fortran compiler, the assembler, and the b compiler!

Thus we come to the UNIX warm boot procedure: put 173700 into the switches, push load address and then push start. The alternate switch setting of 73700 that will load warm UNIX is used as a signal to bring up a single user system for special purposes. See /etc/init.

Where we find...

init is invoked inside UNIX as the last step in the boot procedure. It first carries out several housekeeping duties: it must change the modes of the tape files and the RK disk file to 17, because if the system crashed while a tap or rk command was in progress, these files would be inaccessible; it also truncates the file /tmp/utmp, which contains a list of UNIX users, again as a recovery measure in case of a crash. Directory usr is assigned via sys mount as resident on the RK disk. [...]

An interesting tidbit is the list of files installed into the boot disk from tape on a virgin UNIX system:

/etc/init /bin/chmod /bin/chown /bin/cp /bin/ln /bin/ls /bin/mkdir /bin/mv /bin/rm /bin/rmdir /bin/sh /bin/stat /bin/tap

Thus this is the set of programs available after a cold boot. /etc/init and /bin/sh are mandatory. /bin/tap and /bin/mkdir are used to load up the file system. The rest of the programs are frosting. As soon as possible, an sdate should be done.

BUGS: The files /bin/mount, /bin/sdate, and /bin/date should be included in the initialization list of maki.

Re:Wow, I feel old

[trb]

/etc is et cetera. And dsw, the predecessor to rm -i, has a more amusing etymology [linuxgazette.net]. I've been hacking UNIX since v6. If I needed a source of reliable UNIX history, I would not turn to the Gnome project, and I would not turn to Norway. If you want an authoritative answer, ask Dennis Ritchie. If you want a reliable answer, try an old USENIX hacker, or UNIX historian Peter Salus.

I went to one of the sources.

[sconeu]

According to Dr. Peter H. Salus [wikipedia.org], it means et cetera. [groklaw.net]

According to Dr. Salus, "Editable Text Configuration" is alien to the thinking of the creators.

Re:Pronunciation?

[Dun Malg]

We know "Caesar" sounded like current-German "Kaiser", but this doesn't mean all Latin "C" sounds like "K". I think it depended on the next vowel, as it does in most current romance languages

You think incorrectly. Romance languages and English palatized the Latin 'C' into a /ts/ sound 9 or 10 centuries after the fall of the Roman empire. The Latin 'C' made the hard /k/ sound, always. From the doc you linked:

The Consonants:

* 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 /k/ sound.

Re:Backronym.

[someonehasmyname]

/usr/home is the default in freebsd. /home is a symbolic link to /usr/home.

Re:It means

[HomelessInLaJolla]

I belive i got it from the FHS pdf ages ago

Correct. Full explanation and rationale for the Linux filesystem can be found here [pathname.com]. It is possible that other sources of rationale and explanation exist in other, more venerable, locations associated with AT&T, Bell Labs, BSD, and others who were present at the time that the whole thingw as being fleshed out. This link [pathname.com], and the sections immediately following it, contain the contact information for the people who know where the material originated.

Re:Backronym.

[arth1]

/usr/people is the historical home directory location. Last seen on IRIX.

Disingenious backronym

[arth1]

Keep in mind that pathname.com is only a decade old, and the FHS even newer. /etc and /usr were in use a LONG time before that, and what FHS do are making recommendations for today, not an accurate representation on what went on before they were around.

Yes, "editable text configuration" is a backronym. /etc is et cetera. All the system directories were kept to three letters, and all of the names are abbreviations -- none are acronyms.

/bin = binary
/lib = library
/var = variable
/usr = user
/tmp = temporary
/etc = et cetera
/adm = administrative (now found in /var/adm)
/log = logs (now found in /var/log)

Later additions followed the same pattern:

/net = network
/mnt = mount

In no circumstances were any of these acronyms, and making this up after the fact doesn't make it so. The general acronym fad, or I should say initialization fad, didn't appear until the 80's, and by then, the names were well established.

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

Re:Disingenious backronym

[arth1]

No, /boot is rather new. Historically, the kernels have resided directly under /.

Re:It means

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:first post

[ctzan]

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.

In Spanish...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Backronym.

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Since the root is a part of every path on the system, even a tiny slowdown here will affect everything else too, and it all adds up.

Nah, the blocks for the root directory are most likely always in core, so as long as you don't stuff 10,000 files in root, you'll be fine. Also, a lot of filesystems have binary searching in the directory listing, so 10k files even would be ok.

/etc

[rlp]

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.