From: utzoo!decvax!duke!harpo!zeppo!wheps!eagle!mhtsa!alice!physics!gill Newsgroups: net.general Title: net.general Article-I.D.: physics.152 Posted: Fri Aug 20 20:24:59 1982 Received: Sat Aug 21 06:33:37 1982 ...rc as far back as I can remember stod for "run com" as in a file with shell commands to be run. The only "official" rc file those days was /etc/rc, the going-multi-user runcom file. Then came the ".profile," which was a run com for each user to be run as he logged in. Now I guess it means lots of different things. The .mailrc is the list of commands for mail to execute when it starts up while .cshrc is the same for the C shell. Pace Willisson here thinks he heard someone say this all started in the CTSS days. I never liked the "runcom" word, but can't think of anything that better describes its function (perhaps "startup?", but some runcoms were for doing non start-up tasks). Gill Pratt ...alice!gill OR gill@mc