3 ms·
The s in sbin stood for static initially. Of course nowadays this is not enforced.
by IgorPartola 9mo ago
The s in sbin stood for static initially. Of course nowadays this is not enforced.
- buzer 9mo agoWhat is the source for that? Some of the oldest references to sbin I can find are 4.3BSD Net/2 man pages (https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=4.3BSD+NET%2F2&arch=default&format=ascii https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier&apropos=0&sek...) and Filesystem Standard v1.0 (https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/fsstnd/old/fsstnd-1.0/ https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/fsstnd/old/fsstnd-1.0...). Former doesn't mention anything about static binaries, latter only mentions that static ln (and even mentions sln being static version of ln) and sync can be useful.
- JdeBP 9mo agoThere are no contemporary sources for that because it is, as it was called here on Hacker News some years ago, an 'ahistoric retcon'. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31338349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31338349 The 's' is for 'static' version of the explanation of the name of sbin is not actually supported by any 20th century Unix doco. The books on AT&T Unix System 5 (before which, things were in /etc) that actually give an explanation for sbin all say system binaries, or system administration commands; and none of them says anything about linkage. The 'static link' story came from Linux people years afterwards. Here's Ian McCloghrie correcting this misconception in a Linux discussion back in 1993: * https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.linux.development/c/EKzLcOh9vXQ/m/BpcTkHVLdkMJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.linux.development/c/EKzL... I pointed out the origins of sbin some years ago. * https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2019/02/msg00041.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2019/02/msg00041.html