Isso vai muito longe na história do Unix. rc
significa "executar comandos" e faz sentido:
rc
runcom (as in .cshrc or /etc/rc) The rc command derives from the runcom facility from the MIT CTSS system, ca. 1965. From Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, as told to Vicki Brown:
"There was a facility that would execute a bunch of commands stored in a file; it was called runcom for "run commands", and the file began to be called "a runcom". rc in Unix is a fossil from that usage."
The idea of having the command processing shell be an ordinary slave program came from the Multics design, and a predecessor program on CTSS by Louis Pouzin called RUNCOM, the source of the ".rc" suffix on some Unix configuration files. The first time I remember the name "shell" for this function was in a Multics design document by Doug Eastwood (of BTL). Commands that return a value into the command line were called "evaluated commands" in the original Multics shell, which used square brackets where Unix uses backticks.
( fonte )
Em resumo, rc.d significa "comandos de execução" no nível de execução, que é seu uso real. O significado de .d
pode ser encontrado aqui O que significa o .d nos nomes de diretório?
Por favor, não misture com rc o interpretador de shell que foi incluído no Plano 9, que eram descendentes da Bourne Shell.