Unix naming conventions from the dark times

[Bram]

Hi there,

When wandering through a Unix environment, I sometimes find myself
pondering on those cryptic names one gets across.

Some of them are obvious, others aren't.
I think I know the origin of these 'cryptogrammes':

bin - binaries
src - source
lib - library
dev - device
tmp - temporary
tty - teletype
(nowadays, term for terminal would make more sense, right?)
termcap - terminal capabilities

But what about names like 'var'?
My first (wild) guess would be an association with 'variable', right?
And sbin (system binaries?)
Or 'etc' (etcetera?)

Surely, some elderly fellow-unix-user must remember the origins for
those names from the early days...

Bram Stolk
st...@fwi.uva.nl

[Oliver Laumann]

In article <1992Aug27.1...@fwi.uva.nl> st...@fwi.uva.nl (Bram) writes:
> bin - binaries
> src - source
> lib - library

> [...]

>
> Surely, some elderly fellow-unix-user must remember the origins for
> those names from the early days...

I wouldn't call myself `elderly' yet, but in the first UNIX system I
had access to (UNIX V6, around 1979), the /sys directory (or was it
/usr/sys?) still had sub-directories named `ken' and `dmr'.

At that time we didn't know the origin of these names; I remember
that a colleague of mine guessed that `dmr' might be the abbreviation
for `device management routines' and that the word `ken' must have
something to do with `kernel' :-)

[Dan Busarow]

In article <1992Aug27.1...@fwi.uva.nl>, st...@fwi.uva.nl (Bram) writes:
>
> But what about names like 'var'?
> My first (wild) guess would be an association with 'variable', right?
>

> Surely, some elderly fellow-unix-user must remember the origins for
> those names from the early days...

^^^^^
The early days of Sys V R4 ? :)

Dan

--
+ -
Dan Busarow d...@cedb.dpcsys.org uunet!cedb!dan
DPC SYSTEMS Monrovia, CA (818) 305-5733
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[Guy Harris]

>> But what about names like 'var'?
>> My first (wild) guess would be an association with 'variable', right?
>>
>> Surely, some elderly fellow-unix-user must remember the origins for
>> those names from the early days...
> ^^^^^
>The early days of Sys V R4 ? :)

Early days of SunOS 4.0, actually; "/var" and "/sbin" were cooked up by,
as I remember, Rusty Sandberg as part of the 4.0 filesystem reorg, done
in an attempt to separate stuff that can be shared by multiple diskless
clients from stuff that each client needs a private version of. SVR4,
BSD, and other OSes picked it up from Sun, with some changes (e.g., the
replacement of "/usr/etc" by "/usr/sbin"; given that both Berkeley and
AT&T/USL seem to have gone with "/usr/sbin", I guess I'll just have to
grit my teeth and make "/usr/etc" a symlink to "/usr/sbin"...).