I expect there will be people who reply to this comment to argue it should be "E-T-C" or "Et Cetera". You can ignore those people; they probably say "exclamation mark" instead of "bang".
I know the old Bell manuals actually spelled out "et cetera" long hand in places, but still, any time i hear someone say that out loud meaning the directory, i have a (wholy irrational) cringe reaction!
This is one of those "jif" v. "gif" holy war issues. (Maybe "etc" is a minor skirmish rather than a full blown war.)
Says you. I say 'ek' and my pronunciation is just as valid.
> You can ignore those people; they probably say "exclamation mark" instead of "bang".
Bah. Everyone knows that's a shriek. You probably put sugar in your porridge.
A poor excuse for advancing illiteracy in both the linguistic and operational spaces. It's faster to say, but you've also made it harder for the lay person to understand. This sort of user hostility is a general problem in Linux; we are long since liberated from the days of unreliable teletype links, and the fetish for 3-letter contractions and abbreviated commands like cp and mv (instead of copy and move) does absolutely nothing to foster computer literacy.
Passwd = "password" /usr = "slash user"
If someone doesn't understand you, then you explain and move on. But the industry has based around this jargon and removing/redefining it just creates separate standards.
It's akin to debating Einstein on physics by belittling his accent.
For example, when I say "etsy" out loud, it makes it clear that I'm referring to the actual directory and not just saying "and other things".
It's a way to avoid a bad "who's on first" routine.
To take an example from further down in this thread: Likewise, in print, using cp and mv make it clear these specific things rather than the abstract concepts of copy and move.
Not really a big difference in meaning or tone, if you ask me.
Now, if Dennis told you it was pronounced etsy, you would have a point.
If you look up "etc unix pronounciation", while there is a lot of bickering, I still think "etsy" is the slight majority among old timers. I will admit that this usage seems to have faded.
I spent some time trying to find video of any of the original Bell Labs Unix team actually saying the directory out loud--I couldn't find any. I'm going to keep searching, but they honestly seem to go out of their way to avoid it. I did find some fascinating videos along the way [1].
To my chagrin, there are a few oblique text references on the web that say indicate that within Bell Labs, it was pronounced "etcetera". But I'd still like a canonical reference.
[1] Like this video from 1982, including Kernighan, Thompson, Ritchie, and Aho. http://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0
[1] Ha!
It is a school exercise at least in some European countries. It is a syntactic transformation of the sentence. Depending on the verb and other factors, the transformation preserves meaning, but sometimes it brings up a subject which was not clear in the original sentence in passive voice.
Thus, Numeromancer is suggesting a way for you to reflect on the scope of authority by using a syntactic transformation.
> Not enough people know this, but when you say "etc" out loud in reference to the directory, I suppose it should sound like "etsy".
The passive voice, combined with the opening phrase, gives the false appearance that the subject is the pronunciation of ‘/etc’, when the true subject is you. I put it the way I did because it is a good exercise and because I didn't want it to seem impetuous.
If you're saying that I was being passive aggressive, that's my bad, because I was aiming for over-the-top bravado and didn't go big enough for it to be funny, I guess. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-06-24/