Define - /etc? 548
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?"
etc stands for... (Score:1, Interesting)
it does not really matter but ... (Score:1, Interesting)
reading too much into the naming can be dangerous. consider
but what about reading this name as "/user files", which then creates the awful
Not an acronym (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pronunciation? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Pronunciation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pronunciation? (Score:1, Interesting)
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
Re:Its pronounciation gives us a clue (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Wow, I feel old (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Eet-See (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:It means (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pronunciation? (Score:3, Interesting)
> 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
C:\?what (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Saying what you see... (Score:3, Interesting)
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. :-)
Re:It means (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:etc stands for... (Score:3, Interesting)
User programs that use the etc hierarchy always use /etc for the system etc files, but for a while it was fashionable to have /usr/etc store the "not any of the above" files specific to userspace applications. The same then applied to /usr/local/etc for local versions of user tools.
Programs that needed their own tree, like X11, OpenLook, or whatever, created their own directory off /usr and built exactly the same layout for themselves on a local basis.
This all makes perfect sense, requires no acronymitis, and explains a lot of how Unix got along for so long without a "standard base" specification. If anything, attempts to eliminate some of the directory hierarchies in modern Unix software is actually making it much harder to find anything and much riskier to install software, due to the increased risk of namespace collisions. As none of the older packages considered there to be any risk - they were off in their own isolated namespace - none of the older packages take any care over their naming conventions.
Re:first post (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Pronunciation? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:first post (Score:3, Interesting)