3

A curiosity question which google has been unable to answer for me:

Why is 'resolv.conf' spelled without the trailing 'e'? I'm sure there's a valid historical reason going back to the early days of BSD DNS resolver library.

Improve this question
4
  • The easy answer is because it's a configuration file for libresolv, but of course that just leads to the question of why libresolv is called libresolv. To me it sounds like one of those legacy 6-character limits — the same reason why strcmp & co. are all named with 6 characters.
    – Celada
    Commented Apr 29, 2013 at 22:33
  • 1
    Which implementation had a 6-character limit? libresolv is more than 6-chars, which suggests it's not a filesystem naming limit. And resolv isn't a C function name like strcmp.
    – Flimzy
    Commented Apr 29, 2013 at 22:37
  • 1
    @Flimzy With the .c or .h it's 8 characters, which was the limit. In this case there's a resolv.h in the kernel, so it's probably the same reason
    – Michael Mrozek
    Commented Apr 29, 2013 at 23:07
  • This question also appears to be a duplicate: Why do /usr and /tmp directories for Linux miss vowels in their spellings?
    – slm ♦
    Commented Apr 29, 2013 at 23:25

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
0

I'm going to guess that to ensure things could be typed fast (and more importantly, spelt out loud quickly), everything was limited to six characters - as mentioned above. This wouldn't have been a filesystem limitation, just common convention. 'lib' could be added to the beginning of a name to indicate it was a library, and other appendages could also be added to specify its type and so on.

Improve this answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .