Introducing /run

Posted Mar 30, 2011 21:03 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Introducing /run by pyellman
Parent article: Introducing /run

It's because it's /var/run, only moved to the root filesystem. Why was that not called 'runtime'? Ask the ancient Unix gurus, but since they were plainly obsessed with saving individual characters come what may (e.g. 'creat()') I think the answer can be predicted in advance.

Machines were small in those days. 'runtime' uses four more bytes than 'run'. It may be that simple.

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Introducing /run

Posted Mar 30, 2011 21:43 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (5 responses)

Your less likely to typo with three letters then with 7.

Try typing /etc /etc /etc /etc as fast as you can.
Now try it again with /et_cetera :)

Introducing /run

Posted Mar 30, 2011 22:16 UTC (Wed) by andrel (guest, #5166) [Link] (3 responses)

It's the same three keystrokes either way: /,e,tab

Introducing /run

Posted Mar 30, 2011 22:44 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

You are obviously not using the same shell that people did when they came up with the names.

Anyways... /runtime is no more illustrative of the purpose of the directory then /run.

Introducing /run

Posted Mar 31, 2011 2:44 UTC (Thu) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link]

The term 'runtime' appears regularly as the key word in the explanation of this directory's purpose.

Introducing /run

Posted Mar 31, 2011 21:39 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

Quite, and "because it was called /var/run before" does not strike me as a good reason to keep doing it. Or we wouldn't be tinkering with the contents of / in the first place :-) This could be a golden opportunity to introduce some meaningful names into the filesystem, in the era of tab-completion.

Introducing /run

Posted Mar 31, 2011 2:32 UTC (Thu) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link]

I tried it before asking, and actually, for run vs runtime, I find little difference, even without tab completion.

Introducing /run

Posted Mar 30, 2011 22:08 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

Four bytes have little to do with it; /runtime would take four extra *keystrokes*. (Though with modern completion systems, you can type either as /ru[tab] in many cases.)

Introducing /run

Posted Mar 30, 2011 23:51 UTC (Wed) by nicooo (guest, #69134) [Link]

/var/run
/runtime

Introducing /run

Posted Mar 31, 2011 19:49 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (2 responses)

Re creat(2), I head a story sometime that the length of identifiers in the assembler was limited to 6, and that the compiler added a '_' in front of user identifiers to distiguish them from all sort of internal names used by the compiler and assembler (that was still that way with the C compiler in BSD 4.2 I used around 1985...), thus _creat at 6 characters, user-visible name creat with 5.

Introducing /run

Posted Mar 31, 2011 20:19 UTC (Thu) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link]

The length limit of 6 leaves just enough space for a colon and a tab, and then the code after the label aligns with all the other code.

I don't know if that's the actual reason :)

Introducing /run

Posted Apr 1, 2011 17:32 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yes indeed. Levine mentions this in _Linkers and Loaders_, a book full of gold dust about ancient systems (and a lot of stuff applicable to new ones too).