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- Hacker News
- > So what's a comfile? Clearly it's a shell script, yeah? So why're they called comfiles? It's short for "command files".
The vestige I'm amused by on my (BSD) systems is <foo>.S files. "S" for "Source". From the time when "source code" meant "assembly". Python, zig, C++, C, etc would be invented later...
by bch - I'm the writer of this essay.
My subject is some details surrounding the first white paper that Bell Labs published about Unix was "The Unix Time-Sharing System". I wrote what Ken Thompson was doing in between the end of Multics but before he found the "little used PDP-7" that he wrote Unix on, the difference between opening files on Multics and Unix, and what the "comfile" mentioned in the paper is.
I wrote this without AI involvement; I follow Unix history because I love knowing what the history is and what I can learn from it, and I love showing others these sorts of cool details.
I'd love to hear any feedback you might have :)