Now /etc folder means a central location for all your configuration files are located and this can be treated as nerve centre of your Linux/Unix machine.Ĭoming back to our /etc folder explanation, one post on this is not sufficient and the number files/folder in this directory will depend on the applications you install in it. As time passed the meaning of this folder has changed but not the name “etc”. So they implemented a folder to keep all these files in it and they named it as /etc(As said earlier etcetera). But people encountered a situation to keep some files which can be a config file or a data file or a socket file or some other files. dev folder for all hardware devices attached to machine. In initial days of UNIX OS development there is a folder for each type of data like /bin folder for all your executable binaries /boot folder for all booting related information. The naming convention of this folder is having some interesting history.

“etc” is an English word which means etcetera i.e in layman words it is “ and so on”. ETC is a folder which contain all your system configuration files in it.

What is the meaning of etc