23 Mar
2016
23 Mar
'16
8:38 p.m.
According to "The New Hacker's Dictionary" (Eric Raymond, MIT Press,
1991) "the startup script /etc/rc is commonly believed to have been
named after older scripts to 'run commands'". This name was then
adopted by other scripts.
On 23/03/2016 21:20, Rocky Hotas wrote:
About the History of Unix, I was wondering with
another guy why the rc script has that name. As many of you already know, and according to
NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD (current) manual,
"The rc utility is the command script which controls" the startup of various
services, "and is invoked by init(8)" (from DESCRIPTION).
"The rc command appeared in 4.0BSD" (from HISTORY).
Words may slightly change between the three distributions, but the meaning and the
informations provided are the same. So, the etymology of rc does not appear in the man
pages. Do you know how to recover it? Do (or did) the letters rc have some meaning in this
context?