What does rc stand for?

[Robert Felps]

In <1991Feb22.094951.9539 at news.cs.indiana.edu> sahayman at porbeagle.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) writes:


>    >I suspect the answer is in the Frequently Asked Questions list.  


>Actually, this one isn't.  I thought it was.  I'm trying to find out
>some sort of 'official' documentation of what 'rc' stands for - it's not
>in the jargon file, and I couldn't find anytning in "Life with Unix" - 
>and if I do, I'll add it to the FAQ list.

>If anyone has any firm confirmation of what 'rc' stands for, please email me.
>(Please don't email me just to say "I think it stands for 'run command'".)

I worked for an RBOC (Southwestern Bell) and one of the managers who had
worked at Bell Labs made the statment that /etc/rc was the "Run Card" file
for booting the system. That is, each job you run through a card reader
has a Run Card to start the job running. Thus UNIX needed a run card to
start running. It just so happened that the this file was considered the
run card and thus named rc. Whether this is true are not, I have no idea,
but it sounded good at the time.

>Thanks,
>Steve
>The FAQ guy.

>P.S. Now that the jargon file is getting fairly wide distribution,
>I'm thinking of dropping the pronunciation section from the FAQ list
>and replacing it with a pointer to the jargon file.  If anybody feels
>strongly one way or the other about this, please let me know.