"Martin J. Laubach" <mjl@emsi.priv.at>  wrote:
 > | replying to.  If we are going to go that far, what was the system
 > | that Apollos(?) used to use with environment variables?
 > 
 >   Yup, Apollo Domain/OS has some magic in the symbolic link
 > resolving code. You could make a link 'node_data/etc (yes,
 > the apostrophe is part of the name), and it would resolve
 > to node2AFB3_data/etc (or whatever the node id of this 
 > machine would be). This was heavily used for netbooting,
 > by just having a bunch of generic links in /etc, referring
 > to some appropriate subdirectory for that machine.

yeah, 'node_data was an interesting aberration but I think what the
original poster is referring to was the environment variable symbolic
links:

setenv SYSTYPE bsd4.3
/bin -> $(SYSTYPE)/bin -> /bsd4.3/bin

setenv SYSTYPE sys5.3
/bin -> $(SYSTYPE)/bin -> /sys5.3/bin