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    I don't buy mmory nd dsk spc, but slow tltyps. As long s you cn dcphr th cronyms - why not? Commented Mar 6, 2011 at 10:47
  • @user unknown: Then you are young and never had to worry about memory or disk space. My first computer is 30 years old now - marvel at the specs. Commented Mar 6, 2011 at 13:47
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    I have never written or inspected a filesystem in depth, but does the name of a file/directory in the filesystem occupy more or less space, depending on 1 character? The files themselves always occupy a multiple of some size - today 4k. So most files which contain a path to /usr or /tmp will not effectively get smaller or bigger, depending on a single e. Well - sometimes they will, and then they grow for a whole blocksize, but rarely. And in RAM? I don't know. Commented Mar 7, 2011 at 1:05
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    and it would have been more annoying to type. "temporary vs tmp" ugh... why would anyone want them longer? Commented Mar 7, 2011 at 2:20
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    Modern Unix directories have variable-length entries. Back in Research Unix, a directory entry was a fixed 16 bytes: 14 for the filename, 2 for the inode number. And it may have been smaller when /usr etc. were canonized. Commented Mar 7, 2011 at 8:38