On Sat, May 01, 2010 at 10:52:54PM +0200, Harrell wrote: > Is "usr" an abbreviation of "user"? ... just for curiosity, what is > the origin of this directory name?
Your question has already been answered, but in case you are looking for documentation, here's Dennis Ritchie (as in K&R C)in the 1978 (July-August) Bell System Technical Journal, pp. 1953-4: "It is common for the totality of user files to be too voluminous for a given device. It is then impossible for the directories of all users to be members of the same directory, say /usr. Instead they must be split into groups, say /usr1 and /usr2;" And Steve Bourne (as in Bourne shell), same issue, p. 1981, referring to user "fred" setting the $PATH environment variable: PATH=:/usr/fred/bin:/bin:/usr/bin Finally, looking at our old 1984 SVR2 source distribution, it is evident that the Bell Labs guys preferred abbreviations to acronyms. The distributed root filesystem consisted of: bck bin etc dev lib stand tmp The /usr filesystem contained (in cpio format!): adm bin catman games include lib lost+found mail news preserve pub spool tmp Not until the top level of the source tape do we hit an acronym: cmd games head lib stand uts where uts="Unix Time-sharing System", which I guess is hard to abbreviate;) Yes, I know this is somewhat off-topic, but I think it's fascinating, like, "Why'd they call it 'awk'?" Now there's an acronym for you. Today, hier(7) rules. -- Barry
