dfreniche wrote:
So .d maybe is a reminder of history and evolution of UNIX. In those times, it was hard to send a ls -l and watch the teletype printing. Maybe the .d was used to make clear the dirs... but it's used mostly on dirs where daemon config files resides :lol:
Although I think the .d extension has some history it is not what you think. Previously most of the configuration of the deamons was done in single text files in /etc. For example /etc/crontab used by the crond deamon to list a number of processes to run at certain points in time. This is not very modular as you need to remove/add parts to this file to change it.
Then directories that end in .d were introduced to indicate that the full configuration for the deamon is a concatenation of all the files in that directory (e.g. /etc/cron.d for crond).
This makes the task easier for package managers. If you have a package that contains a command that needs to run every night you only need to add a file in this directory and not run an installation script that adds those lines to /etc/crontab. Uninstalling is the same as you now only have to remove the file and not find the lines you added to /etc/crontab and delete them.
greets,
Staf.
