<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> I suspect that it was in /etc because it was normally run automatically by the shell when the shell detected the need for expanding glob patterns[1], with people not expected to run it by hand. Early Research Unix put a bunch of similar programs into /etc.</p><p>1: eg the V5 sh.c, <a href="https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/source/s2/sh.c" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file</span><span class="invisible">=V5/usr/source/s2/sh.c</span></a> in tglob() and later in execute(), which is where it runs /etc/glob.</p>