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Comment by tyrmored | Hacker News Reader

This is a problem that libetc is supposed to help solve: http://ordiluc.net/fs/libetc/

That’s nice, shame it’s not maintained. On the other hand, one the goals of XDG is to differentiate between application cache, actual settings etc. If FooApp stores 2GB cache file in .foo, redirecting it blindly to .config just makes my backups that much harder.

It also begs the question, why it was named "etc" :)

I'm guessing it's because /etc contains configuration files and dot-files are just configuration files. Or do you mean, why was /etc named etc?

I think they meant the latter. Why is it /etc instead of, perhaps more obvious, /config or /settings?

If it was meant for configuration - probably it would've been - /cfg /ini /set /opt /flg /arg /prm (params)

As someone said - naming things is the hardest!

For the latter, a lazy copy/paste from Wikipedia:

"There has been controversy over the meaning of the name itself. In early versions of the UNIX Implementation Document from Bell labs, /etc is referred to as the etcetera directory as this directory historically held everything that did not belong elsewhere (however, the FHS restricts /etc to static configuration files and may not contain binaries)."

You can ask this question for most of unix. Why /etc? Why /bin and /usr/bin? (Answer: At one time hard disks were very small and crashed a lot), why do we presume screens are black and white, etc, etc.

Try to change any of it though, and a lot of luddites will come out screaming bloody murder. It's just not UNIX if it makes sense.

Maybe the alternative was "..." :)

The origins of /etc are lost in history. Wikipedia [1] says that at Bell Labs /etc was pronounced "et caetera," and contained files that didn't belong elsewhere. And it had the advantage over conf or misc that it was only 3 letters.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard

my de-obfuscation attempt:

etc > e.t.c > edit to configure.

the .rc suffix has a nice history btw

What's the history of that?

Legacy of the runcom shell that let's you record sequence of commands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run_commands

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