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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.

Flimzy
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  • 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 Apr 29 '13 at 22:33
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    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 Apr 29 '13 at 22:37
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    @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 Apr 29 '13 at 23:07
  • This question also appears to be a duplicate: [Why do /usr and /tmp directories for Linux miss vowels in their spellings?](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/8677/why-do-usr-and-tmp-directories-for-linux-miss-vowels-in-their-spellings) – slm Apr 29 '13 at 23:25

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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.

haneefmubarak
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