[TUHS] Again about etymology: rc

[Diomidis Spinellis]

According to "The New Hacker's Dictionary" (Eric Raymond, MIT Press, 
1991) "the startup script /etc/rc is commonly believed to have been 
named after older scripts to 'run commands'".  This name was then 
adopted by other scripts.


On 23/03/2016 21:20, Rocky Hotas wrote:
> About the History of Unix, I was wondering with another guy why the rc script has that name. As many of you already know, and according to NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD (current) manual,
>
> "The rc utility is the command script which controls" the startup of various services, "and is invoked by init(8)" (from DESCRIPTION).
> "The rc command appeared in 4.0BSD" (from HISTORY).
>
> Words may slightly change between the three distributions, but the meaning and the informations provided are the same. So, the etymology of rc does not appear in the man pages. Do you know how to recover it? Do (or did) the letters rc have some meaning in this context?