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From: williams@nssdcs.gsfc.nasa.gov (Jim Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: Different uses of the 5th field of the passwd file.
Keywords: GCOS
Message-ID: <3851@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov>
Date: 8 Nov 90 18:33:17 GMT
References: <723@dynasys.UUCP> <1990Nov6.045108.20266@riacs.edu> <1990Nov8.060424.1828@blackbox.lonestar.org>
Sender: news@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov
Reply-To: williams@nssdcs.UUCP (Jim Williams)
Organization: NSSDC Greenbelt Md.
Lines: 35

In article <1990Nov8.060424.1828@blackbox.lonestar.org> cbradley@blackbox.lonestar.org (Chris Bradley) writes:
>
>What is the `real' acronym?  I've seen both `GCOS' (in this thread) and
>`GECOS' (in the docs for C News, I think)?
>
>What is the correct expansion of the acronym?
>
>-- 
>Chris Bradley			| "I confess freely to you, I could never look 
>Businessland Advanced Systems	| long upon a monkey, without very mortifying 
>Dallas, Texas US		| reflections." 
>cbradley@blackbox.lonestar.org	|		-- WILLIAM CONGREVE 1670-1729

In "Life with Unix", by Libes and Ressler, they say, on page 207,

"GCOS field.  Typically the user's complete name.  It can also contain other
things such as a phone number, or silly comment.  In other words, it isn't
defined.  It is called the GCOS field historically because it was originally
used to define an accounting ID that was submitted with remote batch jobs to
the GCOS system at Bell Labs."

My ancient 7th Edition manuals state that the GCOS field contains the
"GCOS job number, box number, optional GCOS user-id" and that "the GCOS
field is used only when communicating with that system, and in other
installations can contain any desired information."

None of this says what GCOS stands for, of course.  I've never seen it
spelled "GECOS" anywhere but in net messages.

Jim

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