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Peter.O
Asked: 2010-11-04 21:40:46 +0800 CST

What do the abbreviations "etc" and "usr" mean?

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I can relate to acronyms and abbreviations much more readily when I actually know how they were derived.

It is oftn pssble to wrk out wht an abrvtion means if you know the the root words behind it... but unfortunately etc is a standard abbreviation for "et-cetera"... and for usr I think of "user"... but I can't see any correlation.

Most of the terse names in Linux actually make sense when I finally work out the expanded original normal words behind them..

Are the origins of these abbreviations lost in the mists of time, or are they "obvious" to all but me?

This question was prompted by a comment I read yesterday, where someone described these things as Linux incantations ... I sympathize with him :)...

filesystem

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    As you suspected, /etc is from etcetera, unhelpfully named for "where everything else goes", and /usr was for "user applications". A lot of the detail on the history of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is documented on Wikipedia.

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  2. I heard that /usr was for *U*nix *S*ystem *R*esources.

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  3. /etc is an abbreviation for etcetera, as I'm sure you guessed... It's the directory which stores all of your configuration files. /usr, as you guessed, is the directory where "user" files reside; it contains all of the items that are not part of the system itself such as user programs and data. System programs are stored in /bin, user programs in /usr/bin, or, in Ubuntu, in /usr/share/. TuxFiles has a good description of the Linux directory structure.

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  4. The abbrevation "usr" of "/usr" does not mean user. That was only until 10 years ago or so. Since around 2000 it's now the abbrevation for "Unix System Resources".

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