A bit of trivia: what does usr stand for?

[Marty Landman]

At 06:08 PM 12/20/2003, Colin Percival wrote:

>>The urban myth is believeable, though, since it seems silly to abbreviate
>>"user" with "usr" ... I mean, you're only saving 1 letter.
>
>   The same could be said about /tmp.  I suspect it has less to do with
>abbreviation, and more to do with someone having a broken "e" key on their
>keyboard. ;)

I like the broken 'e' key hypothesis, although given the first Unix 
developers were at Bell Labs I find it a little hard to believe; I worked 
at Bell Core once upon a time and faulty equipment like that was something 
I don't recall ever seeing.

So I'll add a pet theory of my own [that just came to mind]. Being an old 
mainframe programmer I can attest to the fact that the last qualifier of a 
file name was conventionally made a 3 char filetype - e.g. asm, pli, obj, a 
convention still largely adhered to today. Maybe the original author of 
these main directories felt that using a 3 char name was in keeping with 
that convention.


Marty Landman   Face 2 Interface Inc 845-679-9387
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