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It's interesting to see all signal names in that early version had six letters (SIGQIT instead of SIGQUIT, even) but SIGPIPE was the exception. Was that one added later?

(Also funny how the article says "this is from around 1978" when the date on the listing says May 24 1976)

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I don't know the real answer, but I've always assumed it's because there's no way to get the right "I" vowel sound without that trailing "E".

Also, when creating abbreviations, it feels weird to create one that is only one letter shorter than the full version.

> Also, when creating abbreviations, it feels weird to create one that is only one letter shorter than the full version.

This is Unix, which gave us the "creat" system call (an abbreviation of "create"). https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/creat.2.html

If it makes you feel any better, the creators of UNIX regrets this.

> Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e."; Kernighan, Brian W.; Pike, Rob (1984). The UNIX programming environment. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0139376992. OCLC 10269821., p. 204.

The C linker of those years only support function names up to 6 characters. That's maybe why the defines try to match their respective function name in 6 char.

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