<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> </p><p>When file systems were very small root partitions often had very little on them beyond /etc. /usr and /home and stuff would be mounted separately.</p><p>Things that you needed to start the system up got shoved into /etc. Most of what was in /etc got moved to /sbin but some of it ended up in /bin.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> immediately clicked as soon as I saw the tripod.com link</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> </p><p>Maybe /bin was full.</p><p>Probably needed it early boot.</p><p>Long ago, /usr did not exist.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> People keep telling me that “/etc” stands for “editable text configuration” but I think this is proof that it really does mean “etc.”</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://toad.social/@grumpybozo" class="u-url mention">@<span>grumpybozo</span></a></span> amazing</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> In early Unix, /etc/ was littered with utilities. It was still the default in Solaris 2.4 (AT&amp;T-derived) to have /etc in $PATH.</p>

<p>this is a nice saturday evening</p><p>what will a catherine do on it?</p><p>that&#39;s right. fixing deprecated cmake policies that break the boost build for this cross-compiled package</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> back in the good old times when people still adhered to the spirit and principles of UNIX</p>

<p><span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> back in the ancient days, there was quite a few shellscripts and other loose configuration-related binaries in /etc. Early linux had lilo binaries there, for example.</p>