"spamfuerda...@gmx.de" <spamfuerda...@gmx.de> writes: > I (and some other people) are wondering about the question:
> "What does .d at the end of some dirctory and filenames actually stand for?" > It does not mean deamon or default. > Does it maybe mean directory? Probably not, cause there are files named > "x.d" too. Once upon a time, most UNIX software was controlled by a single configuration file per software package, and all the configuration details for that package went into that file. This worked reasonably well when that file was hand-crafted by the system administrator for local needs. When distribution packaging became more and more common, it became clear that we needed better ways of forming such configuration files out of multiple fragments, often provided by multiple independent packages. Each package that needs to configure some shared service should be able to manage only its configuration without having to edit a shared configuration file used by other packages. The most common convention adopted was to permit including a directory full of configuration files, where anything dropped into that directory would become active and part of that configuration. As that convention became more widespread, that directory was usually named after the configuration file that it was replacing or augmenting. But since one cannot have a directory and a file with the same name, some method was required to distinguish, so .d was appended to the end of the configuration file name. Hence, a configuration file /etc/Muttrc was augmented by fragments in /etc/Muttrc.d, /etc/bash_completion was augmented with /etc/bash_completion.d/*, and so forth. Sometimes slight variations on that convention are used, such as /etc/xinetd.d to supplement /etc/xinetd.conf, or /etc/apache2/conf.d to supplement /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. But it's the same basic idea. Generally when you see that *.d convention, it means "this is a directory holding a bunch of configuration fragments which will be merged together into configuration for some service." -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87633nb0ln....@windlord.stanford.edu
