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?"
It means (Score:5, Funny)
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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
Backronym. (Score:5, Informative)
But if you remember, programs like mount and user databases (when passwd files got too long to scan) were thrown into
So it really did mean etcetra. And
Re:Backronym. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Backronym. (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
Re:Backronym. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It means (Score:4, Informative)
Disingenious backronym (Score:5, Informative)
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
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but then there was the sendmail configuration...
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Hey, you can edit sendmail.cf by hand. Granted, you are likely to be committed to a mental institution shortly thereafter, but you CAN.
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Re:It means (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It means (Score:5, Funny)
Re: other unix-related bacrynyms: (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Judging by things like "GNU's Not Unix" "etc" is obviously short for "etc's the champ".
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Re:It means (Score:4, Interesting)
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The first time he said "et see" it took him a good five minutes to explain to me what he was talking about, because he lacked the verbal skill required for sentences. And I eventually gave up saying "et cetera" in preference over "et see" - because he wou
I went to one of the sources. (Score:5, Informative)
According to Dr. Salus, "Editable Text Configuration" is alien to the thinking of the creators.
I've always assumed et-cetera (Score:2)
I've always assumed "et-cetera". Sort of like labelling a box "miscellaneous".
It'll be interesting to see what this turns up. I assume that the people that would actually know why it was named that way in Unix are still around and active in computing?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I've always assumed et-cetera (Score:5, Funny)
Shit.
etc (Score:2)
I vote for et cetera (Score:2)
Re:I vote for et cetera (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I vote for et cetera (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:I vote for et cetera (Score:4, Funny)
Pronunciation? (Score:2, Insightful)
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As for the 'ask slashdot' question, I've always viewed it as being et cetera, a place for all the other stuff...
Re:Pronunciation? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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You're quite right of course, but do you actually use these pronunciations in casual conversation?
Not that I have a lo
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
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Re:Pronunciation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pronunciation? (Score:5, Funny)
And if you read a millions lines of Perl, you would come to the conclusion that it has no syntax, then you would scratch your eyes out with a ball point pen.
Re:Pronunciation? (Score:4, Funny)
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> 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
Re:Pronunciation? (Score:5, Informative)
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. 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:Pronunciation? (Score:5, Informative)
* 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
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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?!
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Re:Pronunciation? (Score:4, Insightful)
In my mind I always label people who insist on saying it exactly like it's written down as amatures, or anal retentive, though people who try to come up with ways of saying things like "url" make my teeth hurt.
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I wonder what that says about Microsoft
Its pronounciation gives us a clue (Score:5, Informative)
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Remembering what the hell I was doing in my young'uns pants 25 ye
Bah, (Score:2)
OH GOD, WHY DO I KEEP GETTING ROOTED?
hehehehe.
It's for text configuration data, gets horribly abused though. And Linux/BSD folk have different ideas of what goes there from what I recall.
Tom
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Does that go in
Now, I know that in particular, these directories all have different meanings...but still. Maybe the OSX style 'Applications' folder is a sweet idea, which has symlinks of every binary in it from all of those directories...leave the originals alone for compatibility and ease of setting permissions to a group of files at once...isn't there a
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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
Could be... (Score:3, Insightful)
Configs (Score:5, Funny)
I know who to ask (Score:2, Funny)
So we rather speculate.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck (Score:2)
Extended Tool Chest? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, I feel old (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Wow, I feel old (Score:5, Informative)
However...
> Yeah, name tools that go in
Actually prior to the creation of
Re:Wow, I feel old (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow, I feel old (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the sort of thing that makes me distrust historical interpretation of stuff that actually matters.
Re:Wow, I feel old (Score:5, Informative)
"Ok, you create files in your home directory, you will find the commands in bin or usr bin,
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 ?
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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.
Useless question (Score:3, Informative)
IIRC, some other systems (SunOS?) used to put binaries in there, which never made sense to me
Backward etymology (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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You might as well make the same comparison for any library that gives apps a standard way to query configuration options, and that stores the data in a standard format.
Not an acronym (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah, that's how it seems to be used today. But back in the dark ages
/etc has not always been just configuration files (Score:3, Insightful)
It's et cetera (Score:2)
Chris Mattern
Definition (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, and /lib stands for ... (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, it comes from eta oin shrdlu (Score:3, Funny)
From "The UNIX Programming Environment" (Score:5, Informative)
"/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
It sure ain't "text" anything. (Score:4, Informative)
Where we find...
An interesting tidbit is the list of files installed into the boot disk from tape on a virgin UNIX system:
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. :-)
Is "/." pronounced "slash dot" or "oblique dot"? (Score:3, Funny)
/etc (Score:3, Informative)
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and so, once again, in one line, the Geek reinforces all the negative sterotypes of his species.
/usr (Score:2)
origin of /usr (Score:5, Informative)
(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
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Re:etc stands for... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Best description I've seen for /etc... (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I'm in the "et setera" camp, and prefer the spoken form "et see".
Re:etc stands for... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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>That sounds like the most reasonable response to me, but do you have any references (so that we can correct wikipedia)?
I think you're quite safe to use GP's Slasdot entry as the reference.
sounds ungeeky to me (Score:3, Insightful)
Geeky would be... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:etc stands for... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
Re:Let's be logical shall we (Score:4, Funny)
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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
Re:first post (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ [pathname.com]
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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?
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